She told me, again and again, that she loved my family as if it were her own, that after six years of my being a widower she had come, unlooked-for, to give me a second chapter.

I had lost my wife six years earlier, and I had built a wall around the loss and lived behind it, running my company, seeing my daughter and grandson, telling myself that companionship was for younger men.

And then Rebecca had come over that wall with soup and coffee and patience, and I, who prided myself on being a hard man to fool, had let her, gratefully, completely.

That is the part I have had to understand about myself, because it is the part that let it happen.