I remembered my father taking papers from a hospital bag.

I remembered the years of searching and the lonely birthday cakes I had bought on the day Tobias was born, lighting a candle and letting it burn until the wick disappeared.

And I saw this man now: a surgeon who loved his adoptive mother, who made room for a birth mother he barely knew, who had discovered painful truths without allowing them to take away his gentleness.

Ruth came to stand beside me.