Everywhere else in my life, my history was a thing I had to narrate.

New friends, my ex-husband, the people I worked with: to any of them, a photograph of a small girl on a treehouse ladder was just a picture, and if I wanted them to feel what I felt looking at it I would have to build the whole thing in words, the tree, the summer, the father who made it, and even then they would only get a translation.

Terry needed no translation.

Terry looked at the same photograph and was hit by the same wave from the same direction, at the same moment, without a word passing between us, because he had been there, on the ladder below me, waiting his turn.