I have decided it was both, tangled past separating, and that I can hold both without the gift becoming a thing I regret.

Because here is what I know: a kidney given freely is a good thing, even to a man who turns out not to deserve it, and I would rather be a woman who gave a kidney to an unworthy man than a woman who withheld one from a dying husband on the suspicion he might be unworthy.

The gift was real.

It was mine to give and I gave it, and it is doing its quiet work inside him right now, and that is not the tragedy of this story.

I have made my peace with the kidney.

What I could not make my peace with, lying behind that green curtain, was everything the kidney had been meant to buy, which I had just learned it would never buy, because it had never been for sale, because he had never seen me at all.