He held a folded piece of paper.
The nurse looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry. He insisted.”
I knelt at the edge of the stage.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Mateo,” he said.
His mother stood behind him, crying silently.
Mateo held out the paper.
“I drew this for Emilia.”
My hands shook as I took it.
It was a child’s drawing of a girl with wings standing beside a hospital, holding a giant red heart.
Above it, in uneven letters, he had written:
THANK YOU FOR SHARING YOUR HEART WITH MINE.
The world disappeared.
The cameras.
The reporters.
The money.
Ronald.
All of it vanished.
There was only a little boy, alive because a building existed, because a grandfather loved his grieving granddaughter, because a baby who lived thirty-seven days had somehow reached across sixteen years and touched another child’s chest.
I pressed the drawing to my heart.
