He accepted that with visible effort. Then he asked whether a transplant meant somebody else's child had died. Claire nodded and spoke quietly about donation, consent, and the grief that could exist on both sides of a life-saving operation. Jack looked down, thinking not only of Lily but of parents he would never meet who might one day be asked to make an impossible decision. He did not say it aloud, but the thought of wanting something that could only arrive with another family's loss made him feel ashamed of his own hope.
"You don't have to solve the moral weight of the entire world tonight," Claire said, sensing where his thoughts had gone. "You have one child to love, and we're giving you information so you can make decisions for her. Nothing about that makes you selfish."
Jack nodded. He had spent much of his life refusing to take what he could not return. Medicine had brought him to a place where debts could not be settled with work, where a donor's generosity could never be paid back directly, and where the most loving choice might involve receiving something with no possible repayment. He wondered whether Mara would have handled it better. Then he remembered how she used to hand him the baby without warning when Lily cried and say, We're a team, Jack. Nobody gets extra credit for doing it alone.
Near midnight, a change in Lily's rhythm brought the team to her bedside. The monitors began to sound more urgently, and the physicians adjusted treatment while watching the screens. Jack stepped outside as instructed. The corridor seemed longer than it had the night before, and the sight of staff moving briskly into bed twelve made the muscles in his back tighten until he could barely stand straight.
Claire emerged several minutes later and told him the team had managed the episode. She was careful not to describe it as harmless. It was a serious sign that Lily's heart remained unstable, but the support system was maintaining her circulation and the team was continuing to monitor her closely.
"I heard the alarm," Jack said. "I knew it was different."
"You were right."
He looked past her toward the room. "I can't do anything when those alarms go off. I just stand there like a piece of furniture."
"You can let us do our work. You can ask questions. You can be here when she needs a familiar voice. Those are not small things."
Jack turned away. "You make it sound easy."
"It isn't," Claire replied. "I lost my little brother in a hospital when I was fourteen. There were days I would have given anything to do one useful thing for him. I couldn't. So I sat with him and told him about school and the neighbor's dog. I didn't understand until years later that it was still something."