Chapter 48
Hearts
The man looked at the letter in apprehension. The days were lonelier now, his beloved gone for the past two years. He didn't know how he managed to live on after his wife's death. All he felt was as if it was his heart that had stopped beating along with hers.
Hearts.
Hers was still beating somewhere. That was the source of his thoughts this beautiful sunrise.
A young girl had received his wife's heart. Not the girl that Casey wanted him to donate his wife's heart to. He still had a pang of sorrow that his pig-headed foolishness had denied her friend a chance at life, but that another girl had been saved was a balm.
The grateful recipient wanted to meet him to thank him for offering the life giving organ to her.
Dan McConnell agreed to even though the last thing he wanted to be reminded of was that his wife was dead.
The girl is bubbly and smiling and spoke in the typical haste that teenagers do when excited. She gave him an exuberant hug. As they sit down side by side, she pulled out an expected item from a case by the couch.
"Do you want to listen to your wife's heart?"
The shiny metal stethoscope is cold in his hands. He put the earpieces in his ears and placed the small disc shaped resonator against the girl's skin. There, beating clearly like a running horse's hooves was his Angela, and he felt his heart beat alongside hers for the first time in years.
This episode was the epitome of frustration as people got randomly hurt and the wrong decisions were made. I'm not sure if real life is worse or better than television. I wrote this based off of videos of people who have received hearts offering parents of the donor to listen. There were a couple of famous names, but I didn't recognize them.