“I don’t know what I thought,” he says finally. “I just wanted to know you better, that’s all.” The hand holding the sunflower drops to his side. “I should go.” He bends and lays the flower on the doorstep, at my feet. “It was good to meet you, Quinn. I’m glad you’re okay.”
I don’t say anything.
He nods like I did, then turns and walks slowly down the front steps, away. I look at the sunflower lying there on the doorstep. Colton walks across the driveway to his bus, and I know that if he leaves now, he won’t come back and that will be the end of it. That should be the end of it. Only, in this moment, I don’t want it to be.
My heart pounds louder in my ears with each step he takes, but when he reaches for his door, the only sound I hear is my own voice.
“Wait!”
The word surprises us both.
Colton freezes, and there’s a second before he turns around, when I worry I’ve made a terrible mistake. That I’ve not only crossed a line with him, but with Trent too. It’s not until he turns and looks at me with those soulful eyes that I realize I’m already standing on the other side of it.
“Wait,” I say again, softer this time.
I don’t have to say another word, which is good, because I’m still so shocked at myself I can’t. Colton crosses the yard and is back up the porch steps quickly, but cautiously, like he doesn’t want to frighten me off again. He stops in front of me, one step down, so we’re eye to eye. Waits for me to say something more.
My mind races. What am I doing, what am I doing, what am I doing?
“What about . . . what about your bus?” I stammer. “How do I . . . I need to take care of it, or pay for it, or . . . something?”
He shakes his head, smiles. “No you don’t. It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing, it’s . . .” I fumble for the right words, for any words, really. “I have to make it up to you somehow—for your bus.”
What am I doing?
He turns slowly back around so he’s facing me. “You don’t need to make anything up to me,” he says. “That’s not why I came here.” He shrugs and gives a little half smile. “I liked hanging out with you. So if anything, maybe just come say hi next time you’re back in Shelter Cove. How ’bout that? Sometime?”
It’s an invitation, but he seems to know it offers me a graceful out, if that’s what I’m looking for, and the understanding of this small gesture touches me. I feel my eyes drift to his chest, and my own squeezes tight.
“Okay,” I say finally. “I will—sometime.”
A slow smile spreads over his face. “Sometime, then. You know where to find me, right?”
I nod, and we stand there like that with the sun beating down and the heat of the day already rising all around us. After a moment he turns to go, and this time I don’t stop him. I watch as he walks to his bus and gets in. He waves, then backs down the driveway, and I stand there on the porch. A breeze rolls softly over my skin, bringing with it the scent of the jasmine, and a delicate rush of something else. Hope, maybe. Or possibility. I wait until he turns onto the road and disappears to look down again at the sunflower. This time it looks different somehow—less like a painful reminder and more like a sign, maybe that Trent would understand.
This is what I tell myself as I bend to pick it up. And when I think, Yes, I know where to find him.
“Approximately 3,000 people in the United States are on the waiting list for a heart transplant on any given day. About 2,000 donor hearts are available each year. Patients who are eligible for a heart transplant are added to a waiting list for a donor heart. This waiting list is part of a national allocation system for donor organs. The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) runs this program. OPTN has policies in place to make sure donor hearts are given out fairly. These policies are based on urgency of need, available organs, and the location of the patient who is receiving the heart (the recipient).”
—National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
CHAPTER EIGHT
COLTON’S WORDS FLOAT around me in my room as I sit in front of my computer, staring at the very first blog post I’d read about him. They echo, just like another set of words did, before I knew where to find him: male, 19, California.
Trent’s family had only been given the most basic information about the recipients of his organs, and those three things were all that they knew about the recipient of his heart. That’s all I knew when I’d written to him. And later, that’s what I’d held on to when he didn’t write me back. When I’d wanted to know where to find him, because I needed to know more about him.
A series of words, separated by commas, typed into a search box: male, 19, CA. I’d added heart transplant and got 4.7 million results in 0.88 seconds. Results I could sort by date and relevancy, narrow even further by geographic location, and still came up with endless links to follow, pieces that may or may not even have belonged to the same puzzle. I’d followed them all night after night, turning the pieces in the pale glow of my computer, until I found the ones that seemed to fit.
There are twelve transplant centers in California, but there was only one that had performed a heart transplant on the day Trent died. I’d found it in a blog post, written by a girl who was incredibly scared but who was trying to remain hopeful about her younger brother who had been in the ICU there. He’d already been put on an artificial heart, but he was growing weaker every day as he waited for a new one.