Someone who wanted to hear about my day.

Someone whose face changed, softened, brightened, at the simple fact of my presence.

I had been so alone since my mother died, so completely unattached to anyone in the world, that the plain warmth of Julian’s attention was like sunlight on a plant that had been kept too long in the dark.

I told myself I was there to comfort a dying man.

Looking back, I think we were comforting each other, two people the world had left alone, finding, at the very end of his life, that they were somehow less alone together.