Chapter 21: A Stranger's Heart

Ruggiero's POV

The surgeon's voice came out of the phone loud enough for me to hear it across the pillow.

"We have a donor," he said.

"A woman, thirty-one, killed on the interstate an hour ago. Her family signed at six."

He paused.

"The heart is the right size and the right blood type."

Nerina sat up with the sheet clutched to her chest.

"The right blood type," she whispered.

"It lands at noon," the surgeon said. "I want Costanza on the table by two."

"We're coming," I said.

I put the phone down.

Nerina did not move.

She had her hand over her mouth, and tears ran over her fingers without a sound.

I pulled her against my chest.

"It's real," I said into her hair. "It's on the registry. Nobody can take it back."

"A stranger's family said yes on the worst morning of their lives," she said.

"They did."

"Nobody had to take it from anyone."

I did not know how to answer that, so I held her.

By nine we were in the corridor of the cardiac ward.

Ilaria sat on the plastic chair outside Costanza's door with her gray coat over her knees.

She stood when Nerina came, and then she did not know what to do with her hands.

"They're going to operate," Nerina said.

"I heard."

"You can sit with her."

My mother-in-law's face broke open.

"Thank you."

"I'm not forgiving you," Nerina said. "I'm telling you where the chair is."

Ilaria nodded as though that were more than she had hoped for.

My captain was waiting at the end of the hall.

He jerked his head toward the stairs, and I followed him down four floors to the car garage under the hospital.

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