And girls — two girls in particular, from when he was young, girls he had loved in the helpless total way you love at seventeen, who had simply, in the space of a single season each, disappeared.

Left town, he’d been told.

Moved away.

No forwarding address, no goodbye.

He’d grieved them as abandonments, because that was the story he’d been handed, the story that fit the thing his mother had taught him — everyone leaves.

But sitting at that table with the diary open between us and that sentence staring up at us both — I have made sure of it before — he was, for the first time, doing the arithmetic another way.