Someone had taken it.
She opened the card. Her hands were steady until her eyes moved down the page, and then they weren’t.
“Read it out loud,” Ailani whispered.
Hannah’s voice cracked on the first word.
“Happy birthday, little sister. I promised I’d be here.”
My heart stopped.
The room went quiet. Skylar set down her glass without looking at it. Ailani reached for Hannah’s arm.
“Read it out loud.”
Hannah had no siblings other than Luke. No one could have written that.
“Is this somebody’s idea of a joke? ‘Cause it’s not funny.” Her voice broke; she looked at me, and her eyes were already wet. “Luke was my only brother. You all know how much I miss him. Mom, who wrote this? Who would do that?”
I couldn’t answer. My mouth opened, but the words got stuck somewhere.
All at once, I was 13 years back again.
“Is this somebody’s idea of a joke?”
***
I was standing in a hospital corridor while a doctor said my very sick five-year-old Hannah’s liver was failing. I was calling a phone that rang and rang, a number belonging to a man who’d stopped answering the day he decided we were too much for him.
I was rolling up my sleeve for the donor test, praying, and then hearing the words that shattered me.
“You’re ruled out. You’re not a match.”
I was standing in a hospital corridor.
I was watching my Luke, 18, sit on the edge of a hospital bed, calm in a way no teenager should ever have to be. He was a perfect match.
“Sweetheart, I know you want to help her,” I’d begged him. “But you’re my baby, too. How am I supposed to watch them wheel you both away?”
“She’s my little sister, Mom.” He’d taken my hand. “How could I live with myself, knowing I hadn’t done everything I could to save her?”
He was a perfect match.
The doctors had said the risks were low. They’d said they expected both children to recover. They’d said many things.
The surgery went well. Hannah turned pink again, then loud, then hungry. But Luke got quieter. Then paler and weaker by the day. Then a doctor pulled me into a small office and asked me to sit down.
“We very rarely see complications like these,” he’d told me. “Right now, we’re doing everything we can to stabilize him.”
They couldn’t.
