But I also could not deny what I was seeing, which was a person genuinely trying, clumsily and without any of the grand gestures that come cheap, to become someone different than he had been.

He did not promise to be transformed.

He did not swear grand oaths he would break by summer.

He kept showing up, in small ways, week after week, and small ways that continue, I have learned, are worth a great deal more than large promises that do not.

The first time he stood in that living room facing the father he had never known and the son he had walked away from, he spent half an hour shifting his weight and not knowing where to put his hands, and I was no more graceful than he was.

“I did not come back expecting you to forgive me for leaving,” he told me quietly that afternoon.