"Chris," he said. "It's me. I'm a match. I'm a match for Noah."
Ryan.
The one who, at thirteen, had run his fingers through his own hair and said what if Noah wasn't the only one. The one who started it all.
Seventeen years later, it was Ryan's cells, Ryan's marrow, Ryan's body that turned out to be the thing Noah's needed to live.
I have never in my life been so grateful to lose a coin flip I didn't know we were all desperate to win.
Jake and I weren't matches. For about an hour I grieved that, selfishly, wanting it to be me. Then I understood: it didn't matter which of us it was. It was one of us. It was a brother.
It was always going to be a brother.
Chapter 5: Brothers Forever
Ryan donated that spring.
It's not nothing, what he did — needles, a procedure, a recovery. He waved all of it off the way he waved off the clippers at thirteen. "He'd have done it for me," he said, and that was the whole conversation.
The transplant worked.
Noah is in remission again. Thirty-one now, and the thinness is gone from his face, and the exhaustion is gone from his eyes, and last month he beat me at basketball and would not shut up about it.
Here's the part I'll never get over.
When Noah started the transplant and his hair fell out again — the way it had when we were thirteen — the three of us drove in from three different states, walked into his hospital room, and pulled out a pair of clippers.
One by one, we shaved our heads.
Four bald men in a hospital room, pushing forty-shaped now instead of thirteen, looking like boiled eggs all over again, laughing so hard a nurse came to check on us.
"We're in this together," I told him.
Same words. Same four guys. Seventeen years later, and it turned out we'd meant every syllable.
We're closer now than we've been since high school. The occasional messages are daily calls again. You don't almost lose a brother and then let life drift you apart twice.
Noah keeps the three envelopes. He had them framed — the letters he wrote in case he couldn't speak, the ones that asked for the thing he was most afraid to ask for.
Under them, he hung a photo. Four thirteen-year-olds. All bald. All grinning.
And beside it, a second photo. Four men in their thirties. All bald. All grinning. One of them alive because the other three showed up.
"No matter where life takes us," we promised at graduation, "we're brothers forever."
At thirteen, it meant we'd shave our heads for each other.
At thirty, it meant one of us would give the marrow out of his own body to keep another one breathing.
We were just kids when we made that promise.
