A year later, the afternoon sun filled the sunroom of a small, bright cottage near the coast of Charleston, and I stood in the doorway of it and watched my son play the piano.

Leo sat at an upright piano we had bought secondhand and placed by the window, and his leg — the leg a crate had crushed on a tilting bus, the leg the doctors had rebuilt and the months of patient, determined therapy had healed — carried him to that bench every afternoon with no trouble at all.

His small hands moved across the keys, and out of them came a melody, sweet and simple and confident, that he had made up entirely himself.

There were no brass-buttoned blazers in that cottage that a small boy had to wear in the hope of being seen.

There were no strangers’ coats hanging in the foyer.

There were no boxes waiting to swallow his books, no pink curtains going up where his blue ones had been, no hushed and anxious whispers in the hallway while a five-year-old lay awake wondering whether his father was coming home tonight, and whether it would be better or worse if he did.