He never asked for anything.

He never once suggested I owed him access to the children, or tried to negotiate, or made his kindness a lever.

He wrote to me the way a person writes to family — small news, a line about the weather in Georgia, a question about whether the boys were reading, a few dollars tucked in at Christmas as though they were down the road and not across an ocean.

He asked, near the end, for a photograph, and I sent him one, all five of them squinting on a beach in a country he’d never see, and he wrote back that he had put it on his desk where he could see it while he worked, and that he had been a coward once when it mattered and was trying, in the only ways left to an old man, not to die as one.