let me. He said his mom was the best person he’d ever known and I was going to love her.”
And then she took my hand, this stranger my son had chosen, and she placed it flat on her chest, over the incision, over the heart beating strong beneath it.
And I felt my son.
I felt his heart, my boy’s heart, beating in the chest of a living girl, steady and strong and alive, exactly the way he’d promised. I had buried him three weeks earlier. And here he was, under my palm, refusing to be gone.
I broke completely, and Lily held me, this girl with my son’s heart, and Diane held both of us, and in that hospital room the family my son had built out of his own death came together for the first time.
Chapter 5: The Heartbeat I Kept
That was five years ago.
