I signed it from him, because it is from him. I only carried it. The promise was his. The heart is his. I’m just the man lucky enough to still be walking around because your son decided, at eighteen, that other people’s lives were worth planning his own death for.”
Chapter 4: The Sister Who Got to Say Goodbye
I brought Peter into the living room. Hannah was still holding the card, her face streaked, her friends on either side of her.
“Hannah,” I said, “this is Peter. I need you to listen to him. The card isn’t a joke, sweetheart. It’s the most real thing you’ll ever be handed.”
And Peter, this kind stranger, got down to my daughter’s eye level the way you would for a child, though she was a grown woman now, and he told her what he’d told me. That her brother had planned, in his last days, to keep loving her past his own death. That the promise Luke made — I’ll be at your eighteenth birthday — he’d made real the only way a dying eighteen-year-old could: by asking the person who would carry his heart to carry his promise too.
