“Was there a teacher that stood out for you? For me it was Mrs. White. We used to wonder if she’d had her hair dyed to match her name, but she was the best math teacher. I was good at numbers. There was a beauty to it, a logic, that wasn’t present in anything else in my life. I had a gift, I think, and she saw it. She took me under her wing. I don’t know if she guessed what was happening at home, or whether she was just one of those people who are really good at bringing out the best in every child. Either way, she helped me. I was always the last kid in the building.”

“You didn’t want to go home.”

“To begin with that was the reason, but after a few years it was because I didn’t want to leave. School was a place full of possibilities. Mrs. White made me believe education was the key to another world. I wanted that key so badly. For the first time ever, the future looked exciting. I made it into college because of her. Every night when I left she gave me a new book to read, and every morning I gave it back and exchanged it for a different one.”

“You read a book a night?”

“I read from the moment I arrived home until I fell asleep. If the book was good, I didn’t sleep much. Sometimes I’d talk about the books with my stepfather, but mostly I just lived in my own world, and he respected that.”

“And your mom?”

“She didn’t care what I was doing.” She ran her hand over his shoulder, feeling the uneven texture of his skin under her fingers. “Does it hurt? And don’t lie to me.”

“It’s worse when the weather is cold and occasionally when I use it without thinking. But I don’t mind.” He hesitated. “At the beginning when I was going through the endless surgery and rehabilitation and taking the pain and frustration out on my family, I kept thinking of Finn. Every time I was tempted to feel sorry for myself, I thought about him. And the pain reminds me to live in the moment.”

“I wish I was more like that. I spend half my life—no, more than half my life—” she corrected herself “—worrying about stuff that hasn’t happened yet.”

“You’re not alone. Most of us go through life thinking about tomorrow, and we miss today. That was one of the things that made Finn such a great companion on our trips into dangerous territory. He noticed the small things that other people missed. It was also what made him a great photographer.”

“You don’t talk about him much. You don’t talk about any of it much.”