For six weeks I had believed I was granting a dying man’s simple, sad final wish.

I had thought myself the giver, and him the grateful recipient of my kindness.

Now I understood that the whole direction of it had been reversed, that I had been the one receiving all along, that a man had spent two decades in the dark arranging, with unimaginable care, to give me back everything the world had taken from me before I was even born.

He had not simply left me a fortune, though he had done that too.