He talked about a life he felt he had wasted, about chances not taken and years spent in a kind of exile he never fully explained, about a loneliness that seemed to go back much further than the hospice, all the way down into the roots of him.

He spoke in the careful, elliptical way of a man who has learned to guard his own story, circling certain subjects without ever landing on them, and at the time I took this for the natural reticence of the old and the dying.

I did not understand that he was guarding something specific.

I did not understand that every story he told me had a locked door in the middle of it, and that behind the locked door was me.

Sometimes now, remembering those long quiet conversations, I catch the things I missed at the time, the small tells I had no way of reading.