He gave up his own name so that I could keep my mother.

And in the last hour he had left, when he could have taken the secret into the dark with him and let me believe the gentle story to the end, he chose instead to give her back to me — because a good father, even dying, thinks first of who will be left to hold your hand when he is gone.

I have thought a great deal, since, about the size of what Clement did, because it is easy to say the word sacrifice and much harder to feel the weight of it.

He was a man with a career and a name and a life of his own, and he threw all of it away in a motel room for a woman and a child who were nothing to him — who were, in fact, the assignment he had been hired to complete.

Every year of the twenty-four that followed was a year he chose to keep choosing us.

He could have made the phone call any day.