I said yes, buddy, there’s plenty, there’s all you want, and I will tell you where it all is, and it is never going to run out.

And I watched him file that away, not quite believing it, and take his sister’s hand, and step over my threshold into the rest of their lives.

I did not sleep that first night, and not from worry, exactly, though there was plenty of that.

I lay awake from the sheer enormity of what had happened in my own house, which twelve days earlier had been the ordinary quiet home of a single man who fixed cabinets and watched games and answered to no one, and now held two small sleeping strangers who were, by blood and by grief and by a phone call, the most important people I would ever be responsible for.

I kept getting up to stand in the doorways of their propped-open rooms, listening to them breathe, half-afraid they’d vanish, half-afraid I’d wake them, entirely unequal to the size of it.