One of the Make-A-Wish kids screamed out, “We luuuv youuu, Jeffff.”

“I love you, too,” he said.

The room erupted a second time. Jeff took a folded piece of paper out of his back pocket, opened it, and began to read. “I’m not an angel,” Jeff said.

Silence.

“But I play one on TV.”

Big laugh.

“When I look out at you all in this room tonight, all I see are . . .” Jeff started to choke up. “Angels.” He looked down at his speech and was overcome with emotion. He tried to keep reading what he’d written, but he couldn’t see through his tears. It was raw, unexpected. Genuine. At one point he shouted out something. I don’t know what he said, but the force of it gave me a chill.

The ovation was still going on when he sat back down next to me and asked what I thought.

I had to shout over the cheering. “Pretty much everyone was crying!”

“Really?”

“Not a dry eye!”

“But my speech that I worked so long on . . .”

“It doesn’t matter.” The truth was, I couldn’t remember the words. “What it felt to me like you were saying—without saying it—was that there are some things that go beyond words. Some things words aren’t for.”

Jeff seemed to like my take.

The applause started to swell again and the crowd began to chant, “Jeff! Jeff! Jeff!”

Before he stood back up to take a second bow, he looked at me and said, “You hungry?”

TIM

TIM

EIGHT O’CLOCK. STILL NO ANNA. I TRIED TO THINK WHAT KATE WOULD DO, WHICH was difficult in a literal sense, because she would never be in this situation. I thought about how she handled our boys’ frequent meltdowns and freak-outs with exceptional grace. Her secret? Distraction. So I thought like Kate and came up with a solution. I channel-surfed until I settled on Animal Planet.

What I’d learned so far: The long-eared hedgehog, despite her cute face, is actually a swift-footed predator. Her diet consists of insects and small vermin, including the highly poisonous yellow scorpion, proving an important fact of nature: Either eat or be eaten. Hunt or be hunted. This was nature’s way.

On the screen, a hedgehog was in pursuit of a scorpion. It was a classic chase scene, rife with that age-old question: Will the hedgehog catch the scorpion?

Close on the hedgehog sniffing and moving fast.

Close on the scorpion skittering across a rock, not moving as fast as the hedgehog.

Cut back to the hedgehog, picking up speed.

Cut back to the scorpion . . .

The hedgehog. The scorpion.

I didn’t have a good feeling about this when—

There was a knock on the door.

I froze as the hedgehog lunged for the scorpion, catching it in its mouth. I turned the TV off. That was better.

Mirror check.