I have looked hard at that doubt, because I owe it to Nora to be honest.

And the photograph is my answer to it.

No one posed for that picture.

No one was being paid, in that moment on the floor with the poetry book, to lean his head against an old woman’s knee and laugh.

That was not performance and it was not calculation.

It was simply two people who had found each other and were glad, caught by a camera neither of them knew was there.

I keep that photograph on the mantel now, where I see it every morning, next to the framed letter.