I went, of course.

I stood among the handful of hospice staff who had come to pay their respects to the solitary old man in the room at the end of the hall, and I grieved him honestly, and I thought that was the end of the story: a lonely man, a kind fiction, a gentle death, a small funeral, and a young woman who would carry the memory of six borrowed weeks of being someone’s daughter.

I thought I had reached the end.

I had not reached the end.