“You’re Uncle Silas?” Owen breathed. “And — Aunt Ruby, and Aunt Hazel?”

Silas went down on one knee in the gravel in front of him, grinning through his own tears.

“Yeah, buddy,” he said.

“That’s us.”

I stood back and watched my oldest son shake hands with the uncle he’d only ever met in bedtime stories, and the two families I had spent my whole life either losing or building met each other in a gravel driveway on a Saturday afternoon, and I don’t have the words for what that was, so I’ll just tell you it happened, and that I got to see it.

The weekend that followed doesn’t really fit into words.