“I’m ready.” We went down the wooden stairs through the dunes.

Walking soft sand on a prosthetic is never easy — the heel sinks, the mechanism hunts for leverage, every step is a deliberate act of will.

But for the first time in years the ache didn’t reach me.

Every labored step felt like a step toward keeping the last promise I’d made to the woman who gave me everything.

I thought about her the whole way down, in the way you think about someone when you are about to let them go.

I thought about the first time we walked this sand, sixteen years before, when I was a young man with two good legs and no idea what the world had in store, and she was the most alive person I had ever met.