As I expected, it contained body parts, lots of them, shrink-wrapped in plastic inside little aquariums of preservative chemicals. I was nervous to touch them, but they had been placed carefully in clean metal trays that stacked neatly together. The freezer was spotless—no buildup of freezer burn anywhere. All of the packages were labeled by hospital staff, all of them downgraded for one reason or another: too much fatty tissue; not oxygenated enough; a lesion; a growth of unidentified cells. The date of retrieval was on each, some as old as five years, all of them marked with the cause of death.

In the first few layers, there were two blood-colored kidneys, three purple-brown livers, and one bubblegum-pink stomach. There was a creamy pair of lungs; there was a severed foot; there was the brain. I moved them quickly, worried that they would lose temperature, though I wasn’t sure if it mattered since they wouldn’t be going in another body.

On the lowest level, all on its own, was a human heart.

Cause of death: asphyxiation, the label said. NOT VIABLE was stamped in red. The date of retrieval was the day that Carey Logan died.

*  *  *

I felt the meat of it—that hardest, firmest, always laboring muscle—pushing against the flat of my palm. I pressed it with the tips of my fingers, watching the chemicals around it squish up and around like any grocery store package of meat, and was surprised at how dense it still felt, after three years—how resistant.

White fat ringed the ventricles and lined the seams of muscle in lacy little squiggles. The exterior of the heart was mostly a dark purple-red-blue—the inside of the thickest rare steak you’ve ever eaten—that faded to a brownish peach as it approached the fat. The ventricles themselves, thick, chewy tubes, were a true pink.

It weighed less than a pound, but more than I expected it to.

Drops of condensation began to form on the lid of the freezer. When one of them fell, splashing against the clean bottom of it, I panicked. I wiped out the freezer and set the heart back in its place, then stacked the metal shelves atop each other again and loaded the organs back in, wiping each one clean, hoping that I had not damaged them.

I locked the freezer and stared at it for a long time. It had a puckered white surface, a kind of textured ripple, an aluminum band around the top, and it was where Tyler kept Carey’s heart.

I heard his voice, asking if I was a fan. The guilt that spilled out of his eyes whenever her name came up. I saw the look on his face when I asked about Carey directly, all that misery, and it shook me right down the spine, the vertebrae clicking like ice cubes, like Carey’s frozen heart.