their children and she’d lost hers forever.
She’d received a couple of moving letters from grateful parents, their identities carefully blacked out. She’d put them away with other mementos that were too painful to look at—the funeral program, Riley’s last report card, his baseball cap.
So she’d never contacted the donor registry and hadn’t considered the possibility that they might contact her after all this time.
She reread the letter and waited for the familiar pain to overwhelm her. The guilt was still there, and the ache of longing, but the resentment had faded. That Riley had been taken from her was tremendously unfair, but she would never wish the loss she’d endured on another.
And to think that Riley’s heart lived on filled her with a flood of good memories. She had called Riley her sweetheart. When he did something kind for someone, she told him he had a good heart. Before he was born, she had listened to the beating of his heart in her doctor’s office and begun to know and love him as someone precious who was part of her, yet his own person.
Did Riley’s heart, beating in this other child, sound the same? Would Darcy recognize its rhythm?
What would she do if she did recognize something of Riley in this other child? The idea stopped her short.
If she met this child, she wouldn’t be anything like Riley, Darcy reassured herself. She had a vague recollection of the donor coordinator telling her Riley’s heart was going to a girl. And she would belong to other parents.
Grief was a kind of insanity she only recently felt she’d emerged from. Would meeting this child plunge her back into that darkness, making the loss of Riley fresh again?
She shook her head, and replaced the letter in the envelope. That wasn’t a risk she was willing to take. She’d write to the Donor Alliance and refuse. Maybe one day she’d be strong enough to meet one of the transplant children, but she wasn’t there yet.
“WHAT DID YOU THINK of Darcy, Dad?”
Mike glanced in the rearview mirror at his daughter. Taylor leaned forward in the backseat of the car, straining against the seat belt. Only recently had she been able to abandon the booster seat that had been a source of shame for her. Her health problems had left her undersized for her age. Strangers often mistook her for a much younger child. “Isn’t she awesome?”
Awesome was Taylor’s word of the moment, used to describe everything from her favorite song on the radio to the macaroni and cheese they’d had for dinner last night. And apparently her new dance teacher. “Ms. O’Connor seems very nice,” he said. Though not what he’d expected. “Belly dancer” conjured an image in his mind of someone dark and exotic; Darcy O’Connor was blond and blue-eyed with the kind of curves that would make any man take a second look. Even as concerned as he was for Taylor, Mike had had a hard time not staring.
“She’s so beautiful.” Taylor ran both hands through her dark curls. “I wish I had hair like hers.”
The idea of Taylor with blond curls like Darcy O’Connor almost made Mike smile. “Your hair is beautiful just the way it is,” he said.
“You only say that because you’re my dad.”
Mike felt a pang of regret. Not so long ago his compliments had meant the most simply because he was her dad. Now, apparently, they didn’t count for as much.
“I really like the other girls, too,” Taylor said. “A couple of them I recognized from school.”
“Are any of your friends in it?” he asked. Taylor didn’t talk much about her classmates. This hadn’t worried Mike before. Yes, all her hospitalizations had put her behind some of her classmates academically. Maybe that had hindered her socially, as well.
“Keisha and Monica are the only girls I really hang out with much at school,” Taylor said. “And neither of them is in the class. I think dancing might help me make more friends.”
The note of wistfulness in her voice tugged at his heart, and he felt the tightness in his chest from the old anger he could never completely bury. Why had his daughter been singled out for such cruelty? Why did she have to suffer so much? “I’m sure you’ll make friends,” he said.
“I think so.” She sat back in the seat. “It’s kind of special, you know? Being part of the dance group, I mean. I’ll bet a lot of girls wish they could be in it.”
Mike forced himself to loosen his grip on the steering wheel and reminded himself that in spite of everything, Taylor had been very lucky. She was alive, and likely to live a long, happy life, if she was careful. He turned onto Sycamore Street. “Did you remember to take your medicine?” he asked.
“Yes. I took it before class.”
“Good.” She’d been so excited about the dance class he’d been afraid she’d forget. It needed to be taken on a strict schedule. “I want you to be honest with me—you didn’t overdo it today, did you? The class wasn’t too strenuous?”
“No. It was fun. Darcy’s a really good dancer.”
Darcy again. Taylor was clearly captivated by her attractive teacher. “I imagine she’s been practicing for quite a few years.” Though how long could that be, really? Maybe her petite size made her look young for her age, but she hadn’t seemed a day over twenty-five to Mike. At thirty-six, he felt positively ancient next to her.
“If I start now, I could be that good by the time I graduate high school.”
“I thought you wanted to be a doctor.” He tried to keep his voice neutral.
“I do. But I could belly dance on the side. As a hobby.”
A belly dancing doctor. “That would certainly give your patients something to talk about.”
“Dad, please!” Taylor’s voice drifted toward an unpleasant whine. “You’re always telling people how important it is to exercise. Dancing will be good for me.”
It probably would. And she was bored with spending so much time at his office after school, where he worried she might come down with an opportunistic infection despite all his precautions. But he hadn’t found a sitter he trusted and he couldn’t leave Taylor at home alone.
Even two years out from her transplant surgery, she was still so vulnerable. How could he trust her with a woman he barely knew? “Like it or not, you’re always going to be more vulnerable than other people to illness,” he said. “What if something happened while you were in dance class? What if you have a reaction to one of your medications?”
“Dad, that only happened one time! And it was months ago.”
“But what if it happened? I don’t know if Darcy is prepared to handle that.”
“She would do the same thing they would do at school—she’d call nine-one-one.”
Taylor had to go to school, but Mike tried to keep her away from large groups of people otherwise. Maybe he was being overly cautious, or even silly, but he couldn’t help himself. The knowledge of everything that could go wrong, and the memory of how close he’d come to losing the most precious person to him, haunted him. “I’d be happier if you’d wait a little
