Chapter 23
Two weeks after Matteo’s fateful phone call, Matteo and Helena were in the waiting room at the hospital, preparing to take a series of tests that would tell them if Matteo’s liver was a match.
Helena’s fingers were laced with Matteo’s.
She felt unable to speak. So many things had been said between them.
So many promises had been made. What else was there left to say?
But when their names were called, they stood, kissed one another, then moved as a unit into the back room, a room painted white filled with October sunshine.
The tests lasted no more than two hours—a mix of blood, antigen, and body-size testing.
Because Helena was on the taller side, they hoped things would be okay.
But there were no guarantees, Helena knew, and the doctors were careful to keep their opinions to themselves, lacking the science to back them up.
Helena hated feeling like a lab rat again.
But, immediately afterward, as she handed the woman at the front desk her insurance card, she thanked her lucky stars again for having gotten insurance in the first place.
She’d made this happen for herself despite all the doubt she’d had.
She wasn’t sure where that hope had come from. Was it from Nantucket itself?
Afterward, Matteo drove them back to the house on the shore, a house into which Matteo had moved his few belongings the previous week. For Helena, it was still hilarious to see how easily Matteo’s things fit beside hers. It was like the house had really only been half-full before he’d come into it.
It would take a week to find out whether Matteo and Helena were a match. Matteo suggested they distract themselves in every way they knew how. “Kissing, for one,” he said playfully, listing them out on his fingers. “Watching movies. Reading books. Going for walks on the beach.”
Helena burrowed herself into his chest and listened to his heartbeat.
“You know, you don’t have to go through with this,” Helena told him for maybe the thousandth time.
Matteo pressed a kiss into her forehead. “Helena, I love you,” he said.
“But it’s crazy,” she told him. “We barely know each other.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Matteo said with a laugh. “I’ve known you for more than four months at this point. That’s a lifetime, really.”
Helena rolled her eyes, then joined his laughter.
It felt delicious to laugh, to sit on a sofa with a gorgeous man, to eat the dinners he prepared for them, to roll around, kissing.
If Matteo’s liver wasn’t a match, if they couldn’t go through with the transplant, Helena told herself that this was still how she wanted to spend the final year of her life.
However long she had left, she knew that Matteo would be there, making her giggle.
Why was she so lucky?
That weekend, Helena and Matteo went over to Bethany Sutton’s for lunch.
Over a feast of lasagna and nonalcoholic wine, they laughed with Bethany, Rod, and their three children, Maddie, Phoebe, and Tommy.
Phoebe especially cracked Helena open with laughter.
She was a thespian, and she told them that she planned to move to London to study Shakespearean theater.
She told them that she was a reincarnated silent-film actress.
“She’s been saying that since she was seven,” Bethany said. “Her father used to hate it.” Bethany beamed, as though the idea of her ex-husband hating something like that pleased her.
“How’s it feel to be a real Nantucketer?” Rod asked Matteo, beaming.
Matteo said it was beyond his wildest dreams. “I wake up every day next to the most beautiful woman in the world, on the most beautiful beach in the world.”
“Can you believe this one left for so many years?” Rod gestured toward Bethany.
But Helena now knew more about Bethany’s backstory: how Bethany and Rod had dated in high school, how Rod had had a girlfriend while Bethany was away, how that girlfriend had gotten pregnant and ripped Bethany and Rod’s relationship in two, for the time being.
It was a wonder that they’d found their way back to one another.
That night, although Helena was exhausted and she needed at least ten hours of sleep, she slow-danced with Matteo in the kitchen of their place, shifting gently against him as an October rain came down hard outside.
Matteo kissed her nose, her chin. He told her, “You’re brilliant.
You’re the greatest love I ever could have found. ”
Sometimes late at night, if Helena stayed up, she asked Matteo questions about his daughter, Jenny.
She thought that talking about Jenny made her feel more present, as if her memory were still ongoing.
Matteo told Helena stories about Jenny as a kid, how funny she’d been, how she’d hardly ever cried.
Matteo said that he’d tried to teach her things that he’d loved, but that she’d always marched to the beat of her own drum.
“I loved that about her. I loved everything about her,” he said, his eyes far away.
Sometimes Matteo asked her questions about her parents, about what they’d done together, about what it had been like to say goodbye.
Helena didn’t hold back. She knew these were the sorts of conversations that drew two people together, that drew their hearts closer.
But she was unafraid, suddenly. She wanted it all.
At the beginning of November, they heard from the hospital that they were a match.
The doctor wanted to schedule their surgeries immediately.
Helena heard herself make an appointment for the day before Thanksgiving, which felt obscene.
But if this really worked, there would be so many more Thanksgivings after this.
There would be glorious days with friends and food and laughter.
Matteo said the date fit his life perfectly, because Helena was his life.
They laughed and cried and kissed and began to prepare.
If all things went well during the surgery itself, they weren’t necessarily in the clear.
Sometimes organs could fight you, and sometimes they rebuked the new system within the first year.
Matteo, too, would have a few years of recovery.
He decided to take those months off from work so he could tend to himself and Helena.
After they returned home, they decided to hire a nurse to help them. They’d hire a cleaner and get their groceries delivered. They’d focused entirely on the joy of being together and learning to be well again.