the vodka but I held onto the wine.
She tipped her head back, chugged the vodka straight from the bottle and handed it back to me.
“Then you’ll fucking adopt or freeze your eggs. It will be fine. Stop being so negative.”
She was right. I was never like this before Colin died. I was the optimistic one, but my future was ripped away from me and I was a planner.
A planner without a plan.
“I just…” I stared off into space. “I never got closure. I mean we were going on our honeymoon the very next day. I never got to say goodbye or prepare or…” A sob escaped my throat. “Kiss him one last time.”
Julie reached out and grasped my hand, tears forming in her eyes. “Honey, I see tragedies every day in the ER. Life doesn’t give you a warning. You just need to make the best of it in the aftermath. Just yesterday we had a similar case where a lady lost her husband and he was a donor.”
She paused, checking for signs of distress on my face. I just nodded and she continued. “They had been married thirty-two years. It was a factory accident. Anyway, we told her there was a perfect match for his heart and she flipped. She wanted to know who was going to get the heart and meet his family and all this crazy shit. It’s like she—”
I squeezed her hand tightly as dizziness washed over me.
The donor recipient.
Why the fuck hadn’t I thought about the donor recipient all this time? Maybe if I could meet them, I could get some closure.
A lopsided smile lit up my face. “Julie, you’re a genius. Yes! The donor recipient.”
“Oh, God. No.” Julie shook her head. “That’s not what I meant—”
“Julie, it’s perfect. I can meet the donor recipient and see that Colin has given someone else a chance at a new life. What if it’s like a twelve-year-old kid with his whole life ahead of him, or a mom with five kids?” I jumped up onto the couch and the room swayed. “This is it! This is what I need. My closure.”
I looked down at my best friend. Her head was in her hands.
“Julie.”
“No,” she mumbled in her hands.
“Jul, I need your help. I need the recipient’s info.”
Julie looked up at me and sighed. “You can file a formal petition with UNOS and if the recipient agrees, they can schedule—”
“No, Jul. I want to meet this person without them knowing who I am. Otherwise it’s too much pressure on me and what if they say no? I need you to get the info for me without UNOS knowing.”
“Millie…” Julie yanked the bottle from me and chugged the vodka, wincing as it went down. “That sounds like stalking.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Not really. I’ll just walk into their place of work, or business, or school, and strike up a conversation. I just want that little bit of contact and then everything will be okay. I need to see that Colin is living on.”
Julie shook her head. “I’m not even sure that I have access to that shit. It’s all in UNOS. I could be fired for even looking.”
I nodded. “But wouldn’t it be in Colin’s file from that night? Couldn’t you try?”
I’d known Julie Anderson since middle school. She was my ride or die. There’s nothing we wouldn’t do for each other.
She grabbed the bottle of vodka and started chugging.
The night passed in a blur of vodka and tequila shots and me crying. We’d long abandoned the wine and went straight for the hard stuff. At some point I think Julie threw me in the shower. The memories were hazy.
The next morning, when I woke, I thought I might actually be dead. Dead people didn’t feel pain though, right? A raging headache slammed into me before I’d even opened my eyes, which felt puffy and swollen shut. My stomach churned as finally I dared to crack my eyelids open.
“Ow.” Light crashed into my eyeballs and then into the back of my brain, causing pain to flare in my skull. I went to rub my face and felt a piece of paper stuck to my cheek.
“What the…?”
Peeling it off, I glanced at it with one blurry eye. I’d closed the other one in a survival effort to let in minimal light. In Julie’s drunken cursive script was a name and address.
Ashton Knight (28)
Wayne’s Place
300 Broadway Street, Nashville, TN 37208
Colin’s donor recipient
My breath hitched in my throat at those three words.
Colin’s