Colonel Reeves’s office smelled faintly of coffee, leather, and printer paper. Once the door closed, the outside noise disappeared.
Harrison did not sit immediately. He looked at me as though he was trying to decide where to begin without breaking something important.
“Specialist Parker,” he said, “before anything else, I want to thank you properly. I would not be standing here without you.”
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“You don’t have to thank me, sir.”
“I do.” His voice was quiet. “You were exhausted, off duty, and dealing with your own responsibilities. You still stepped forward.”
My throat tightened at the word responsibilities. I thought of Ethan at our small apartment, probably asleep on the couch with his biology textbook open on his chest, pretending he was not scared every time his chest hurt.
“I had the right blood type,” I said. “That was all.”
“No,” Harrison said. “The right person had the right blood type.”
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Colonel Reeves gestured toward the chair. “Sit down, Parker.”
I sat because my knees were beginning to feel unreliable.
Harrison sat across from me and placed a second folder on the desk. This one was older, worn at the corners, with a faint crease across the front.
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“Three weeks ago,” he said, “I was brought into St. Jude Medical Center after an accident outside Columbus. Most of the details are not important right now. What matters is that the hospital struggled to locate compatible blood quickly enough. Your donation kept me alive long enough for surgery.”
I nodded, though the words seemed to come from far away.
“After I recovered,” he continued, “I asked to thank the donor. The hospital would not release your identity without proper authorization, which was correct. But because this involved military personnel, and because I had reason to believe there was a prior connection between our families, I requested a lawful review through appropriate channels.”
A prior connection.
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The phrase landed softly, but it changed the air in the room.
“My family?” I said.
“Yes.”
“We don’t have connections to people like you.”
A faint sadness crossed his face. “That is what someone wanted you to believe.”
I opened the envelope again, pulling out the photographs with careful fingers. The first showed a young woman standing beside a lake, hair blown across her cheek, one hand resting on the shoulder of a little girl. The girl looked about six years old. She had straight brown hair, serious eyes, and a missing front tooth.
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