To have a daughter.

Even a borrowed one.

Even for a little while.”

I should have found the request strange.

I know that.

If a stranger had described this scene to me, an old man asking a young volunteer to play his daughter, I might have felt the wrongness of it, the oddness, the way it crossed some ordinary line.

But sitting there with his thin hand gripping mine and his eyes full of a longing so deep and so sad that it seemed to come from somewhere much older than the hospice, I did not feel any of that.

What I felt, instead, was my own heart breaking, because his wish had reached down and touched the exact shape of the wound I had carried my entire life, and I could no more have refused him than I could have refused a part of my own self.