MY DY:ING HUSBAND BECAME AN ORGAN DONOR AS HIS FINAL WISH

"I can't give her my arms," he wrote. "But I can give her my heartbeat. I recorded it on a good afternoon, when it was still strong, so that our little girl can press a bear to her ear any night she misses a father she never got to meet, and hear that his heart was real, and steady, and beating for her before she was even born. Every child should get to hear their father's heart. I made sure she always can."

I pressed the bear's paw again, in that lobby, and I sobbed, because there it was — my husband, alive in the one sound that had lulled me to sleep for three years, preserved so his daughter would never be without it.

But the letter went on. And the next part explained the secret meetings, the "something I need to arrange," the thing he couldn't tell me while he lived.

Chapter 3: The Heart He Sent to a Little Girl