But that wasn’t all Luke did. Because Luke, being Luke, thought of Hannah.
“Before they took him back for the surgery,” Peter told me, “your son gave the coordinator a letter. He said: if I don’t make it, I don’t want my sister growing up thinking her brother left her. Find the person who gets my heart, when they’re allowed to reach out, and tell them this — that I promised Hannah I’d be at her eighteenth birthday. I promised her before the surgery. And I want the person carrying my heart to keep that promise for me, so she knows I was there. So she knows a piece of me made it.”
Chapter 3: The Heart That Kept the Promise
Peter told me the rest, and I wept through all of it, the good weeping, the kind that has eighteen years of held breath inside it.
When Peter received Luke’s heart, he didn’t know whose it was — donation is anonymous at first. But he knew a young person had died to save him, and he’d spent years living differently because of it, more gratefully, more awake, the way people do when they’re carrying a gift they can never repay.
