“He asked us to read you something. If you ever called. He said you probably would.”

I gripped that phone so hard my hand hurt. “Then read it.”

The coordinator cleared his throat. And he read it slow, like he understood it mattered.

“He says: I gave you up because I was nineteen and terrified, and I told myself a stranger would do better. I was wrong about a lot of things. But every year I gave back what I could, on your day, so somewhere out there a piece of me was still keeping someone alive. I never thought it would be you.”

I couldn’t breathe right for a minute. Marco woke up and saw my face and just held my hand without asking anything.

I asked the coordinator if there was more.

“One more line,” he said. “He says, You don’t owe me anything. I just needed you to know you were never, not once, forgotten on that day.”

That was three weeks ago.

His number is sitting in my phone. The coordinator gave it to me after he read the message, said George had okayed that too. I’ve pulled it up probably forty times. I get to the part where my thumb is over the green button and I put the phone face down on the counter and walk away.

I don’t know what I’d say. Thank you feels small. Why didn’t you come sooner feels cruel for a man who showed up every single October when he didn’t have to show up at all. Maybe both are true. Maybe that’s allowed.

I still haven’t called him. October’s coming, though.

And I keep thinking the same thing, over and over. He’ll be at that hospital on the fourteenth. He always is. I could just be there too.