Standing in that dressing room, letting him fix my tie, I already thought of him as my son.

There was a particular healing in Timothy, for me, that I had not expected.

For fifteen years I had watched my daughters grow up in the long shadow of a mother who left, and I had worried, privately, about what that would teach them about love, about whether they would learn to expect abandonment, to guard themselves, to settle for less than they deserved out of a belief that people leave.

And here was Timothy, a young man who had looked at my Samantha, with all her history, and chosen her freely, and stayed, and would keep staying.