He could not purchase a piece of a healthy stranger’s body for the grandson he had found too late.

He could only wait, and hope, like any other frightened man in any other hospital hallway, stripped for the first time of the fortune that had always stood between him and the ordinary helplessness of being human.

He tried anyway, at first, because trying was the only language his grief knew how to speak.

He made calls.

He offered to fund a wing, a research chair, a fleet of anything the hospital wanted, if only there were some way to move his grandson to the front of a line.

And every doctor and administrator he reached told him, with varying degrees of patience, the same thing: that there was no line to move him to the front of, because the thing Santiago needed could not be manufactured or purchased or expedited, only given, freely, by a healthy human being who matched him and chose to.