It was three weeks of afternoons.

It was a few careful lines at a time, day after day, in the hours I was gone, each session costing her something she did not have much of left to spend.

And she spent it.

She spent three weeks of her own dwindling strength, in secret, saying nothing, writing and resting and writing again — not to ask anything for herself, not to summon help for her own frailty, but to make sure that the world knew what her grandson had done, and to reach across an ocean and pull his brother home to him.

That is a kind of love I did not have a name for until I understood what those twelve pages had cost.