Here was a man being slowly murdered by the family he had, listening to a young woman describe the son she had lost to a man who walked out on her, and beginning to wonder, with a hope so fragile he dared not say it aloud, whether the two griefs might somehow fit together.

He had spent decades believing his own son was gone beyond finding.

And now, in the last place he would ever have looked, in the exhausted account of his caregiver’s abandonment, a possibility had flickered to life.

He was right to be careful with it.

Hope, for a man who has trained himself for years to expect nothing, is a dangerous thing to let back in.

But it had come back in, and I think, looking back, that it was that flicker of hope, as much as anything I did, that gave him the will to keep fighting his way back to life.