For six weeks after that evening, Julian and I were inseparable, and they were, though I did not yet know it, the only six weeks of true fatherhood the man would ever be allowed to have.

I came on every day I could, and often on days I could not, rearranging my small life around the hours by his side.

I pushed his wheelchair slowly through the hospice gardens while he named the flowers and turned his face up to the sun.

I took him to a little diner he loved, where he ate pancakes he was not supposed to have and grinned like a boy getting away with something.

And once, on a bright cold afternoon, I bundled him into my old sedan and drove him a long way, to the coast, so that he could feel the sand beneath his feet and the salt wind on his face one more time before the end.