It had shaped how I loved, how I trusted, how readily I expected people to leave.

And so when Julian, dying and alone, told me that life had separated him from his own little girl before she was born, that he had spent his whole life aching over a daughter he never got to hold, he was describing, without knowing it, the other side of my own wound, the father’s grief that I had always assumed my own father was incapable of feeling.

It did not occur to me, not for one second, that the symmetry was anything but a sad coincidence.

I only knew that his pain and my pain were somehow the same pain, and that saying yes to him felt less like doing a stranger a kindness than like answering something that had been calling to me my whole life.