The worst thing that ever happened to me, the loss of the only family I had, turned out to be the doorway to the thing I had wanted most in the world.

I do not pretend to understand how such things work, or to believe they are arranged by any hand kinder than chance.

But I know that I walked into that building carrying nothing but sorrow, and I walked out of the story it began carrying a father, a name, a history, and a love that had been following me, patiently, in the dark, my whole life long.

Grief took my mother.

And grief, in its blind stumbling way, walked me straight to my father’s door.

Chapter 2 — The Man with No One

I noticed Julian because of the emptiness around him.

In a hospice, you learn to read the traffic of visitors, and most of the patients had a steady stream of them, children and grandchildren and old friends filing in and out, filling the rooms with the noise of lives that had been full.

Julian had no one.

In the weeks I had been walking those halls, not a single visitor had ever come to his door.

There were no cards on his windowsill, no photographs on his bedside table, no flowers wilting in a vase.

There was only Julian himself, a thin, gray, quietly dignified man who sat in the armchair by his window for hours, looking out at the garden, with an old radio murmuring softly beside him and a stillness about him that was not quite peace and not quite sorrow, but something more patient than either.

He was the most alone person I had ever seen, and I recognized something in that aloneness, because I had been carrying my own version of it since my mother died.

So I started stopping by.