Love asks you to be worth it.

My father did not give his life so that I could spend the rest of mine in penance for having received it.

He gave it so that I could live — fully, and gratefully, and without the shadow.

I had spent twenty years dishonoring his gift by treating it as a debt.

My mother handed me back the truth of it on a sidewalk, and it was, I think, the second life he gave me: the first when he pushed me clear of the car, and the second, twenty years later, when his widow finally told me why.

Chapter 15 — How She Came Back