The children in the courtyard had loved him.

Joaquín had carried a debt of gratitude for him for years without his knowing.

The aloneness had been real as a feeling and false as a fact, and the proof of its falseness was standing in front of him now, waving, holding a hand-lettered sign, refusing to let him slip away unremarked.

He lowered his hand at last and pressed it briefly to his own chest, a gesture the whole group understood, and then he turned and walked through the barrier into the rest of his life — not as an heir, not as a survivor, not even as the teacher they called him, but simply as a young man going to school, carried there by more love than he had ever, in his darkest years, believed the world contained.

Chapter 40 — Six Years