He sat in the plastic chair beside the bed. He had the paper in his hands. He'd been holding it all night, he realized; he hadn't put it down since Rosie had handed it to him.
"How do you feel?" he asked.
"Like somebody hit me in the back with a shovel. Two hundred times." She shifted on the pillow and grimaced. "They put a lot of needles in. They gave me some of my own blood back after, from a bag they took two weeks ago. I'm supposed to walk tomorrow." She looked at the paper. "You read it."
"I read it."
"All of it."
"All of it."
She was quiet for a while. Then she said, "I was going to tell you. After. I didn't want you to—I didn't know if you'd think it was stupid. Doing it for a stranger. On her day."
"It wasn't your choice, the day."
"No. They moved it. The girl relapsed, they said, and her doctors wanted to go now while she was strong enough. Once they start the chemo, there's no going back. They wipe everything out to make room. If the donor backs out then—" She stopped. "So I couldn't."
"No," Tom said. "You couldn't."
"They told me it was a sixteen-year-old girl, and I thought, that's somebody's Dani. Somewhere. Somebody's sitting in a waiting room right now hoping some stranger shows up." She closed her eyes. "I swabbed in that gym in Pasco for Ray Delgado's nephew. Do you remember? Eight years ago. I didn't match him. I didn't think about it again until they called."
"You texted me," he said. "In July. I didn't answer."
"I know."
"I'm sorry."
She opened her eyes and looked at him for a long time.
He held up the paper. He put his finger on the line. On his own name, with the neat straight stroke through it.
"Why'd you cross me out?"
She didn't answer right away. Out in the hallway someone's monitor beeped, and stopped, and footsteps went by.
"Because I wrote you down first," she said finally. "Without even thinking. Like a reflex. I was sitting at the table filling it out, and it said support person, and my hand just wrote Tom, like it's been doing for eighteen years. And then I sat there and looked at it, and I thought, he's going to say yes. He's going to say yes, of course, and mean it. And then two days before, the phone's going to ring. Some line's going to be down somewhere. And he's going to stand up from the table and look at me." Her voice was very steady. "And I couldn't do it again, Tom. Not that day. I couldn't sit in that room at five-thirty in the morning, waiting to be put to sleep, and find out I was alone after all. It was easier to just be alone from the start."