She would listen to the jazz and tap her fingers and feel nothing older than the moment.

Every day I hoped, and every day the door stayed shut, and I began to understand that hope, sustained day after day against silence, is its own particular kind of exhaustion.

But I did not stop.

She had wandered twenty years to find her way back to me.

The least I could do was leave every light in the house on.

Those weeks taught me something about hope that I had never understood from the comfortable side of my old life, which is that hope is not a feeling.