“Your grandfather said the same thing, apparently.”

Thomas smiled.

“That sounds like him.”

He explained that Anna had died from complications of an illness when he was twenty-one.

Walter’s grief had not been quiet.

He had withdrawn from work and treated everyone’s attempts to reach him as intrusions.

Thomas had been grieving his mother too, but he and his grandfather had barely spoken for two years.

“Then one night in December 1999, Grandpa called,” Thomas said.