I sat on the floor of my kitchen and I wept in a way I had not wept even at his grave. The scholarship. The rent. The medical bills. All my life I had believed myself to be simply lucky, saved again and again by strangers and charities and anonymous kindness, and it had been him, all of it, this quiet man with the taped-up Scrabble box, following the wreckage of the life he had ruined and trying, in whatever small way he could, to hold it together.
When I learned that I was dying, the letter went on, I made a decision that I know was selfish. I had spent thirty-one years watching you from a distance and never once allowing myself the comfort of your company. And I found that I could not die that way. I could not go into the dark without once, just once, sitting across a table from you and hearing your voice and knowing you as a person and not as a penance.
So I arranged it. I will not tell you all the strings I pulled to make sure you were the volunteer assigned to me, because the details do not matter and the lawyer helped me with more of it than he should have. I only wanted a few weeks. I told myself I would take a few weeks of your kindness, selfishly, and then I would die and you would never know, and the debt would remain unpaid but at least I would have known you.
But then I did know you. And you were everything. You were kind to a dying stranger with no family and no reason to earn your gentleness. You cooked for me and you laughed with me and you let me cheat at Scrabble and you never once suspected that the man across the table had stolen your childhood. And I fell in love with you, not the way a husband loves a wife, but the way, I think, a father must love a daughter. Fiercely, and helplessly, and with the terrible knowledge that he does not deserve to.
