For six months he had been searching for me, and behind those six months lay fifteen years of separation, of honoring a plan that kept him from the family he had left.

And now, finally, after all of it, he had found his sister’s daughter, and the circumstances were a disaster, his operatives exposed, his careful delivery botched, his niece frightened and angry and out four hundred dollars because of his people’s mistake.

He must have been mortified.

He must also, underneath the mortification, have been feeling something enormous, the near-completion of a fifteen-year mission, the first contact with the last living pieces of his sister.

And he kept all of that out of his voice and simply spoke to me steadily and took responsibility and came, in person, within the hour, to make it right.