He understood that hope of that magnitude is not a gift you hand someone carelessly; it can break a person as badly as grief can.

So he did something much harder and much kinder.

He carried the suspicion alone, said nothing, and engineered a situation in which, if the impossible thing were true, I would discover it myself, safely, with my own hands and my own eyes and my own certainty — and in which, if it were false, I would never have to know he had hoped at all.

He was willing to be thought a madman, willing to let me rage at him for dragging a homeless stranger into our home, rather than risk raising a hope he could not guarantee.