On Tuesday afternoon, the messages stopped.
No calls. No texts. Nothing.
At first Wyatt seemed relieved. By evening, I caught him checking his phone every few minutes. At dinner, he pushed his food around and said, out of nowhere, “He never just gives up. He’s the most stubborn person I know.”
I thought about Ezra at graduation three weeks earlier. How thin he’d looked in his gown. How he’d sat down on the bleachers instead of jumping around with the other boys. How he’d quit the basketball team that winter “to focus on grades,” even though Ezra had never cared about grades a day in his life.
I thought about Renata’s red eyes at the ceremony. I’d assumed it was the usual mother tears.
And I thought about that letter from the transplant center.
Mr. Cole.
Just Mr. Cole.
At 9:40 on Wednesday morning, my phone rang. It was Renata. We hadn’t spoken since the weekend.
