“Stay here. God will take care of you.” Then she turned and walked away – mynraa

I almost laughed. Imagine needing a stranger’s pen to make this official.

The preliminary typing came back late that afternoon. I was not just possible. I was promising. The transplant team wanted more testing, and they wanted it fast.

That was when Caleb asked to meet me.

No one pushed it. Marisol made sure of that. She asked if I wanted to say no. I should have. Instead, I heard myself say, “Five minutes.”

He was smaller than I expected. Bald in patches from treatment. Skinny wrists. Huge brown eyes. He sat in bed wearing red superhero socks and holding a plastic dinosaur with one broken leg.

When I walked in, he looked from me to my sister and back again.

“Are you really my aunt?” he asked.

Kids have a way of stepping around adult land mines and landing on the one word that blows everything open.

I pulled a chair halfway to the bed and sat down. “I’m the person the doctors wanted to find,” I said.

He considered that. Then he nodded like it was enough for now.

“Mom said you play piano at a church,” he said.

“I do sometimes.”

He held up a piece of paper from his tray. It was a crooked drawing of a knight with a shield way too big for his body.

“That’s me after transplant,” he said. “Because my blood will fight right.”

I smiled before I meant to.

He smiled back, missing a front tooth.

There are moments that make your anger harder, and moments that make it impossible to hold in the same shape. Caleb was the second kind.

I left his room and sat in the hallway with my hands folded so tightly my nails marked my skin.

Evelyn sat down next to me without touching me.

“You don’t owe the adults mercy,” she said. “But don’t punish the boy for the people who built the fire.”

I knew. I hated that she was right, and I knew.

The final match testing took three more days. Those days were worse than the confrontation in the church. My parents kept trying to turn necessity into reunion.