Her granddaughter, horrified, had tracked Danny down. And Danny — seventy-six years old, with a bad hip and a heart that had never once let go of me — got in his car and drove across four states to knock on my door.
“I’m so sorry, Ruthie,” he kept saying, at my kitchen table, both of us crying. “I should have fought harder. I should have found you. I believed her, and I let fifty-five years go by, and I am so sorry.”
“You didn’t know,” I told him, holding his old hands across the table. “She lied to both of us. She stole this from both of us. You are not the one who owes an apology. And she’s gone now, so there’s no one left to give one. There’s only us. And however much time we have left.”
Chapter 4: The Years We Had Left
I want to tell you what I decided at that table, because it’s the thing I’m proudest of in a long life.
