Chapter Two
CHAPTER TWO
Nina isn’t picking up her phone. This is the second time I’ve called her on my way home, and the answerless drone is a trigger, shooting me back to the days after Brad: those nail marks I stabbed into one palm as I clutched the phone in my other, the broken glass at my feet, the blood on the floor.
I shake the echoes from my head—this is nothing like that, this is good news —and leave Nina an excited shriek of a voicemail: “Neens. Call me back. Morgan responded again.”
When I received Morgan’s initial response earlier in the week, I read it to Nina over the phone, dissecting every sentence. So ever since his new message landed in my inbox on my lunch break, I’ve been eager to share it with her again. Maybe I misremembered her schedule and she’s at the hospital, hustling from patient to patient. Or maybe she’s out with Alex for date night.
I smother a flash of jealousy as I turn into my driveway. Nina and Alex have been married three years; Alex is basically a brother to me now. But there are times—selfish, childish times—when I want to come unquestionably first in my best friend’s life. Like tonight, when the man I’m into has messaged me again.
You’re not “into” him , I hear Nina scolding me. If anything, you’re into his Instagram.
And his writing. And his sense of humor. His kindness and self-deprecation.
I climb the stairs to my apartment, then unlock the door as I reread Morgan’s words on my phone. My eyes skip to the parts I love best.
Hey, you… I already know he didn’t deserve you… I’d love to know more about you…
In my bedroom, I set my phone beside the books and prescription bottles on my nightstand, then swivel toward the mirror. I force myself to laugh, checking to see if, like Morgan’s wife, my nose scrunches when I do, but instead, I’m confronted with a face I’m still getting used to, moon-round and puffy from high doses of prednisone. There’s a twinge in my chest, like I’ve already disappointed him. He asked me to tell him more about myself, but after the details he shared about Daphne, I’m afraid I’ll come up short. I don’t have endearing, hyperspecific hobbies like collecting photos of bicycles and baking only one kind of bread. I don’t crochet. I don’t make anything, really. My only focus lately has been Morgan and the continued work—meds, checkups, tests—of staying alive.
I start to change out of my work clothes, but my bracelet snags on the zipper of my boatneck dress, as if reminding me that even my jewelry—a MedicAlert ID—is part of my survival plan. When I wriggle free, I catch my reflection again, see the scar on my chest that’s the wrong kind of pink. Not cotton candy. Not a match for my hair. A color like raw meat. What happened to your heart? Morgan asked. But there’s a better question, one I ask myself all the time: What will happen to it?
I slide into yoga pants, pull on a T-shirt. Then I open my closet, close my eyes, and grope for my sneakers. When my hand brushes a too-familiar garment bag, I flinch like I’ve been cut.
The night is cool when I step back outside. Zipping up my jacket, I jog down the exterior stairs and walk thirty feet to the house I grew up in. Since my transplant I’ve lived above my parents’ garage, a one-bedroom space they used to rent out, then ushered me into after the hospital. Before that, I lived fifteen miles away, close enough to commute to Just Say Yes, far enough that I didn’t feel like I’d rebounded straight from college back to my hometown.
This living arrangement was supposed to be temporary, just the first couple months of recovery, my parents cooking for me, refilling my prescriptions, driving me to weekly follow-ups for blood tests and biopsies. But by the time I was well enough to return to my own apartment, just the thought of that place—where I’d loved Brad, mapped out our future, then grieved it as if both of us had died—resurrected symptoms the transplant should have cured: deep fatigue, shortness of breath, pressure in my chest. So Nina packed up my haunted apartment for me, and for some reason, despite her offer to get rid of it, I insisted she bring me my ghost. Insisted she hang it in my new closet, as if I might wear it again.
Inside my parents’ house, the TV is on, a laugh track wafting from the living room. Bumper bounds over to me, tail and tongue wagging, and I crouch down to greet him. “Hey, Bumps,” I say into his fur.
“Hey, Rosie girl,” Dad says from his recliner, eyes fastened to a Frasier rerun. Bumper’s nails click on the floor behind me, his tail thumping against an end table, eager for his walk.
“Rosie, did you authorize a refund the other day?” Mom asks in lieu of a greeting. She sits on the end of the couch closest to Dad, his chair positioned so they can still hold hands.
I scratch the top of Bumper’s head. “It’s one of my comps.”
“Already? Rosie, it’s only May.”
“But it was a return. So we can resell it.”
“At a lower price point,” Mom tuts. Her disappointment is futile, though. She gave me this policy knowing full well I’d use it. “Was there something wrong with the gown?”
“Um. No.” I think of Edith, her face splotched with tears, and make a mental note to get in touch with her soon, make sure she’s doing okay. “The bride’s fiancé canceled the wedding.”
My parents slide a look at each other, their brows denting with the same worried crease.
I pretend not to notice, heading to the hutch where we store Bumper’s leash. My eyes catch on the two picture frames perched on its shelf, and I brace myself against a familiar pang. The frame on the left displays my parents at twenty-three, Mom beaming up at Dad, the sleeves of her wedding gown puffing around her arms. To the right of that photo is one of my older sister, twenty-five at the time, dressed in a strapless Lazaro, while my brother-in-law kisses her cheek.
For a while, there was another picture on this shelf, one I’d planted there myself, a placeholder for my wedding portrait with Brad, where I’d be smiling out from the glass just like my mother and sister—young, in love. Loved in return. But in the placeholder, as I gazed up at Brad like a flower stretching toward sun, his eyes were pointed off camera, and now there’s only an empty space where that frame once was, lined with a film of dust.
“I can start walking him again, you know,” Dad says as I clip on Bumper’s leash. “I’ve finished my PT. The doctors encourage me to move around. So if you’re not feeling up to it, or too tired after being on your feet all day, just say the word.”
His tone is casual, but I know there’s concern in the offer. My transplant was traumatic for them, too.
I dip down to kiss the top of his head, then squeeze Mom’s shoulder. “I’m good,” I assure them, and I glance back at the pair of frames on the hutch—seeing, for an instant, only Brad inside them.
I blink and force a different image: Morgan Thorne, his hand on my chest, warming the heart that guided him to me.
“I’ve never been better,” I add.
Nina calls as Bumper and I reach the end of the sidewalk and step onto pavement.
“Sorry,” Nina starts, “Alex took me thrifting and I left my phone in the car.”
“Did you find anything good?”
“Yeah! A suitcase of wigs!”
“That’s… creepy.”
“No, it’s awesome. They’re good quality, and there’s one I can use for my Jem costume this year. I’m making Alex be one of my Holograms.”
Nina is evangelical about Halloween, so I’m not surprised she’s already piecing her and Alex’s looks together, five months in advance. She’s crafty, too—she’ll sew whatever she can’t find already premade. I think of Sickle with the hats Daphne crocheted for him, think how, if Morgan ever meets Nina, he’ll love her creativity.
“But anyway,” she adds, “Morgan wrote back again?”
“ Yes . Here, I’ve screenshotted it for you.”
I pause to send the message, and Bumper sniffs at a leaf. As Nina reads, I tug him along. Our route has grown progressively woodsier, and if given the chance, Bumps would investigate every pebble and pine needle skirting the street.
“Hmm,” Nina says when she finishes. “That’s kind of fucked-up.”
I stop short. “What is?”
“That the thing he loved about his wife was that she had some kind of childhood trauma.”
I continue on, shaking my head as if Nina could see it. “That’s not what he said. He loved that she was able to endure the trauma. He said he’s drawn to people who’ve lived through darkness and survived it.”
Am I someone like that? In every relationship I’ve ever been in, darkness has been the thing I fear most—the way it settles in with time, keeps a couple from seeing each other the way they once had, when everything between them was dizzyingly bright. For me, that darkness has always been inevitable. It’s just how things go: sparks become fires, and fires burn out.
But then there was Brad. Then there was darkness like none I’d ever known—so deep it wasn’t only him I couldn’t see anymore; it was myself, too.
“It just seems weird to me,” Nina says. “And now I’m curious what her childhood trauma was.”
“I think her sister died? Daphne’s obituary said she was predeceased by her sister, but I couldn’t find anything else about it. I wish there was a subtle way to be, like, ‘Hey, about that terrible experience your wife had… Could you elaborate on that? Preferably in a five-paragraph essay with footnotes and citations?’?”
Nina doesn’t laugh at my joke.
“I’m kidding,” I say. “I’m not going to mention it.”
“But you are planning to respond to him?”
“Yeah, as soon as I get back from Bumper’s walk.”
By habit, Bumper slows as we pass a house I love to admire—a yellow colonial with a half circle of stained glass above a green door. Not too long ago, that house was for sale, and I wish I’d been ready then, wish I’d had a partner to move there with me. I glance at the hand holding Bumper’s leash, see the glint of my MedicAlert bracelet—which, with no other options, lists my mother as my emergency contact.
“Rosie,” Nina says, before gusting out a sigh. “What is your plan here? I thought all you wanted to do was confirm that Daphne was your heart donor.”
“I mean, yeah, that’s how it started, but—”
“Okay. And now you’ve done that. So why keep messaging him?”
“Because we’re having a good conversation. I want to see where it goes.”
Bumper pulls to the right as we approach the entrance to another street, but I hold his leash tight, steering us straight. Dad always takes him that way, but I prefer a different route.
“Where it goes?” Nina echoes, her tone a little scolding. “I know you have this… crush on him—but, Rosie, you can’t, like, date Morgan Thorne.”
A car rumbles up the road, and I click on my headlamp so they know to stay clear of me and Bumper. After they pass, I keep it on. The woods around us are thickening, the trees with their new leaves blocking out the moon.
“You have his wife’s heart,” Nina continues through my silence. “You can’t have her life, too.”
I’m not surprised by her reaction. I can’t expect her to understand. Not when she met her soul mate three weeks after graduating from college. Before that, she was always the dumper, kindly quitting her relationships with a reassuring hug. She’s never had to fight for love, never felt it as a luxury. And because it came easy to Nina, the kind of love people promise at altars, she can’t comprehend my chronic anxiety that I’ll never make it to an altar at all. And because of that, I haven’t told her my most urgent truth—that I feel each beat of my heart like the tick of a clock.
I’ve done the research, spoken to my doctors: heart transplants last, on average, about fifteen years. And that’s if something else doesn’t attack the body first; immunosuppressants keep me from rejecting my new heart, but they’re nearly as likely to welcome infections and cancers as they are to keep me alive. Then there’s the vasculopathy, an artery disease that eventually clobbers all transplant patients, that will come for me no matter how diligent I am in taking my cyclosporine every twelve hours. That means, someday, I’ll be back in that hospital bed, and I might not be so lucky the second time, might not live long enough to accept someone else’s heart. With Daphne Thorne’s, everything aligned: our proximity, our matching blood types, her organs becoming available while I was a Status 1 candidate. It was a miracle, really, and another isn’t guaranteed.
I think of that empty space on my parents’ hutch, and how I’m dying to fill it with a frame of my own, while I can still enjoy the life, the love, my wedding portrait would hold.
“You agree with me, right?” Nina says. “I mean, transplant aside—you don’t actually know this guy. He could literally be a murderer.”
I nearly trip over a stick that Bumper’s picked up and abandoned. “Why, did you see that Instagram comment?”
“What Instagram comment?”
His wife’s death wasn’t an accident.
I’ve thought about it a lot since the other night. The sheer cruelty of taunting Morgan on his own page, almost a year to the day he found his wife unconscious on the bathroom floor, blood blooming from her skull. For an instant, I see myself there, beside him at the moment of discovery, holding his hand, holding him back, so he doesn’t slip in all that blood, doesn’t leave his footprints there.
I tell Nina about the comment, there and gone with its bot-like handle. I tell her I’ve combed his recent posts for other trolls and, thankfully, none have turned up.
“First of all,” Nina says when I finish, “I don’t follow Morgan on Instagram—so no, I didn’t see that. I just meant: he’s a complete stranger, so he could just as easily be a nice, normal guy as he could be a serial killer.”
“Really? Just as easily?”
Nina ignores my teasing. “DonorConnect is not a dating app. This can’t actually go anywhere. You see that, right?”
No. I don’t. Because my heart is a ticking clock—and it’s led me straight to Morgan.
“He’s expecting me to respond,” I say, trying a different tack. “He asked me questions. And don’t I owe him answers? I’m only alive because his wife is dead. Doesn’t he deserve to know about the person who… who has her…”
My sentence slows to a stop in sync with my steps. Bumper pauses, too, nosing at familiar ground. To our right, the trees have opened up, revealing an acre of grass—a wide, dark carpet unfurling toward a house where floor-to-ceiling windows glow from inside.
I turn off my headlamp.
“No,” Nina says. “You don’t owe him anything.”
Inside the house, Morgan sits on his couch, watching something on his laptop. As he reaches for his wineglass on the coffee table, he doesn’t break his gaze. He sips as he stares.
I see his screen in my mind. My most recent message pulled up. I see him hover over my words with his cursor, an almost-touch. Then he refreshes his inbox. Click. Click. Click.
I see me sliding onto the couch beside him. See us clinking our drinks. See Sickle purr in our laps, belly-up, velvet-soft, his namesake claws retracted.
“Rosie?”
Morgan sips. He stares. He sits behind his window, like a picture in a frame.
“Rosie? Are you still there?”
“Yeah,” I answer, but even I can hear how distant I sound. My thoughts—my future memories, maybe—are still inside that house, the blueprint of which I already know so well, its Zillow listing bookmarked on my browser. “Sorry, what were you saying?”
Bumper lifts a leg to pee, and in my ear, Nina sighs.
“Just—forget all this, okay? Don’t write back to him. Don’t fixate on his Instagram. Just leave it alone. Leave him alone.”
“You’re making it sound like I’m stalking him,” I say—and then I wince, aware of where I’m standing.
But Morgan’s house is less than a mile from my parents’, and Bumper needed his walk.
“I’m not crazy,” I add. Then, away from the phone: “Come on, Bumps.” As he trots beside me down the street, Morgan’s house disappears behind us, the trees closing ranks again.
“No, not stalking,” Nina says. “And not crazy. But we both know you tend to”—she pauses, and I sense her choosing her words—“go a step too far.”
“That doesn’t sound a lot better.”
“You know what I mean. You’re… enthusiastic.”
“Ugh, fine,” I say—because I can’t deny that. When I love someone, I simmer with it, my excitement bubbling higher and higher until I boil over with devotion. In high school, I left a letter in Noah’s locker every day, turning the bottom into an overflowing recycle bin. In college, I celebrated Jared’s run as Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by plastering his dorm room with pictures I’d taken of him during the show—something his roommate complained was “creepy.” Every man I ever dated eventually accused me of going overboard with my displays of affection. And they’re probably right. But on my four-month anniversary with Brad, when I baked him four of his favorite desserts, he said, Oh wow , biting into the crème br?lée before kissing me with sugared lips. You know I’m going to expect this forever now, right?
The memory clamps around my heart, quickening my breath, and I’m glad when Nina continues.
“So promise me you’ll leave it alone, this thing with Morgan?”
I know why she’s insisting. It’s my own fault. I want to see where it goes , I told her, but she already knows where it—a crush, a relationship—has taken me before. She remembers me crumpled on concrete, remembers the blood on my hands. If I keep arguing, she’ll speak of that night—my very worst—in specifics. No dancing around it, no dressing it up as a step too far or enthusiastic .
So I tell her okay. I continue on into the night, Bumper by my side, and I do what she asks. “I promise.”