I understand now, of course, that it was not a coincidence at all, that the reason his wish fit my wound so exactly was that his wish and my wound were two ends of the same twenty-year story.

But even knowing that, I do not think I was wrong to feel what I felt.

Something in me recognized something in him, beneath all the not-knowing, some deep unconscious current of blood or memory or simple longing that ran between us before either of us had any idea it was there.

People will tell you that such recognitions are impossible, that a daughter cannot simply feel her father across a room full of strangers, and perhaps they are right, perhaps it was only the ordinary sympathy of one lonely person for another.

But I was there, and I felt it, the strange rightness of him, the way saying yes to him felt less like a decision than like a homecoming, and I have never been able to fully explain it as coincidence.