He was not hoping, not asking; he was making a plan, sure as sunrise, that this — the dancing, the two of them, the us — would still be here at the end, would be the through-line of a whole life.

And I sat on the floor as the woman that boy’s promise had been made to, sixty-three years old, and I had to face what we had done with his certainty.

We had not broken the promise in any way you could call a betrayal.

We had done something quieter and, I think, sadder: we had simply forgotten we made it.

Let it slip so far down under the mortgage and the children and the decades that neither of us could have told you, a week ago, that it had ever been made at all.