Instead they had chosen, in the depth of their own devastation, to hold me up.

Evelyn called me every few days through those six months, not to ask about money, not to complain about a birthday, but simply to say she was thinking of me, that she loved me, that Jonathan would have wanted her to check that I was eating.

Donald, without being asked, drove over one weekend and built me a bench for the backyard, so that I would have somewhere to sit among the trees we would plant, because that is the kind of thing a father does.

They were not my parents by blood.