Chapter Thirty-Six
Mara sent a photograph in the mail, an actual print, the old-fashioned way, of the three of us—Wren, Theo, and me—at a barbecue Ruth had hosted the week before.
She’d been invited. She’d come with Diane, cautiously, the two of them still finding their way toward whatever new shape their relationship would take.
On the back, in Mara’s handwriting: A photo I actually had permission to take. Progress, on all fronts.
?
My kidney function tests, and hers, came back that same week. Both of us stable. Both of us, in the specific arithmetic of transplant medicine, doing better than the coordinator had dared to predict.
“Six out of six antigens,” Wren said, reading the results over my shoulder. “I looked it up. That’s basically as good as it gets.”
“It is.”
“I used to hate that number,” she said. “Now I think it might be the only clean thing in this entire story. The one part where the truth and the outcome actually matched.”