The only thing you truly cannot mend is not-caring, and nobody in this whole sad situation had ever managed to stop caring, however hard the adults had tried to make them.”

“What if she doesn’t even remember me?” he whispered, and that was the one that frightened him most, I could tell, the fear underneath all the others — that he had spent five years and a shoebox of letters being faithful to a little girl who had simply grown up and forgotten he ever existed.

I could not promise him she remembered, and I would not lie to him; lying to him was what everyone else had done, and I had decided from the start that whatever else I was to this boy, I would be the one adult in his life who told him the truth even when it was hard.

So when he asked whether she might have forgotten him, I did not say of course she remembers.