They’re better than okay. I think about him a great deal, my brother, and the guilt that used to come with those thoughts has slowly turned into something else — not peace, exactly, but something in the neighborhood of it.

Because I know now that Thomas did everything a father could do.

He loved them, he provided for them, he built them a safety net out of a lifetime of careful work.

He was not failed by his own foresight; he was failed by a person he trusted, as good people so often are.

And when that net failed, another one held: a brother who almost missed it, who nearly let three years of polite distance become forever, but who got a second chance on an ordinary summer afternoon when a six-year-old remembered his address.

I will carry the almost for the rest of my life — how close I came to not knowing, how much I want back those three years.