It reached him as a language he was fluent in, spoken by someone drowning in it, and he found that he could not pretend not to understand.

Some griefs make you smaller and more guarded.

But every so often, if you’re lucky, an old grief turns instead into a kind of fluency — an ability to recognize the same pain in a stranger’s voice and to know, without being told, exactly what it needs.

What it needs, usually, is very simple.

It needs someone to say: I can come. And to mean it.

Chapter 3 — Storrow Drive