To hand back, all at once, on my last day, thirty-one years of the attention I had been paying them and never receiving.

The watcher was, for one morning, watched.

The woman who had been everyone’s witness was, at last, herself witnessed, by the whole scattered length of the road she’d threaded together, and I stood at Emmitt Wilkes’s mailbox with coffee going cold in my hand and understood that I had not been as alone, all those years, as I had let myself believe.

They had seen me too.

They had just been waiting, the way proud quiet country people wait, for the one right day to say so.

Chapter 15 — After