Any one of a dozen small turns, and he would have died with the word he crossed two decades to hear still locked, unspoken, in his chest, and I would have carried my false and lonely story to my own grave.

He had built the most elaborate plan imaginable to bring us together, and still, at the very end, it had all come down to whether a grieving young woman would say four warm words to a lonely stranger.

I said them.

I said them without knowing what they meant, without knowing they were the answer to a twenty-year prayer.

And I will be grateful for the rest of my life that, whatever guided my mouth that evening, it did not fail him.

Chapter 7 — Six Weeks