After a few years, through the donor program, contact became possible if both sides agreed. Peter reached out to the donor family — to me — but I, drowning in grief, had never responded to those letters. I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear to meet the strangers walking around alive with pieces of my dead son. It felt, back then, like it would break the last of me. So Peter’s letters went unanswered, and he respected that, and he waited.
But the coordinator had passed Luke’s message along to Peter years ago. And Peter had never forgotten it. He knew there was a little girl named Hannah, saved by Luke’s liver, who would turn eighteen — and that the boy whose heart beat in his chest had made a promise to be there.
“I wasn’t going to intrude on your grief, ma’am,” Peter said. “But I couldn’t let your son break a promise he died making. So I found out when Hannah’s birthday was. I’ve been, I’ll admit, keeping a quiet eye — from a distance, nothing strange, just making sure I knew when the day was. I took that photo of her three days ago, from across the park, so the card would be recent. So it would feel like now. So she’d know her brother’s promise reached all the way to today.
