So let’s not build the rest of our lives on the part we can’t change.” And Aurelio understood, sitting across from a seventeen-year-old who had every right to hate him and had chosen not to, a thing he had never learned in seventy years of getting his own way: that asking forgiveness does not oblige the other person to erase the wound, and that being forgiven is not the same as being told the harm didn’t matter.

Santiago was not erasing anything.

He was simply refusing to let the past run the future.

It was the most adult thing Aurelio had ever seen anyone do, and it had been done by the grandson he had almost let die alone.

They talked for a long time that night, longer than they ever had, and Santiago said one more thing that Aurelio kept for the rest of his life.

“I spent years being angry at people,” the boy said.