I did not know, then, anything real about him.

He presented himself to the hospital staff, and to me, as a man entirely alone in the world, a forgotten soul with no living kin, and I had no reason to doubt it, because it was exactly the kind of person I had spent a year sitting beside.

I thought I was comforting a lonely old man in his final days.

I did not know that the lonely old man had lived a whole enormous life, full of love and craft and unbearable loss, and that he was, in those unhurried conversations, quietly deciding that I was the person he had been waiting decades to find.