his window on a dark night and seen something in a woman sitting alone on her steps that told him she was the kind of person who would not quit.
He had been right.
But what he could not have known, what she understood only now, was that his own quiet loyalty to that assessment — his years of watching and waiting and testing and ultimately trusting — had been its own kind of not quitting.
He had been looking for his family to come back.
They had not.
So he had
