For two years, unknowing, I simply loved a lonely old man, and he simply loved his daughter, and neither the debt nor the guilt nor the abandonment was in the room with us, because I did not know they existed.

It was, I think now, the only way we could ever have found each other: in ignorance, as friends, before the terrible truth arrived to complicate everything.

He gave me those two clean years by not telling me.

It was another deception.

But it was also, I have decided, a mercy, perhaps the only genuinely selfless thing he ever did for me: he let me love him without the weight of who he was.

Chapter 4 — Two Beautiful Years