My husband was reading a picture book in silly cartoon voices to a sick little boy in a garden, and the boy was laughing that unguarded, wholehearted laugh that only children still have, and neither of them had noticed me standing there yet.

I could not move.

I stood at the edge of that garden and watched the man I had thought was slipping away from us, and he was not cold, and he was not distant, and he was not lost to his work.

He was here, in the sunlight, giving a frightened child ten minutes of pure joy.

Whatever I had imagined driving over here, whatever confrontation or gesture or surprise, it fell entirely away, and what rose up in its place was so large I did not know how to hold it: a grief and a love and an awe at this man, all tangled together and rising in my throat at once.

There are moments when you see a person you have known for years, seen ten thousand times across a breakfast table, and suddenly you see them entirely fresh, as though for the first time, and the sight rearranges something in you permanently.