He had been sitting there listening to his own daughter describe him as a man who never looked back, when he had done nothing for twenty years but look back, and he had had to absorb that, silently, and keep his face from breaking, and say something gentle, because it was not yet time.

I do not know how he bore it.

I think that is the thing I understand least about my father, the sheer weight of what he carried in silence, smiling, so that I would not know until the moment was right.

What I understood was only that I had found, in this failing gray stranger, something I had been starving for without knowing it.

Someone who was glad when I walked into a room.