“I know that now,” Harlan said. “I think I was more afraid of being defined by the hardest part of my life than I ever gave any of you credit for understanding. Turns out the hardest part of my life is also the part I’m proudest of, most days. I just needed considerably more practice saying that part out loud.”
Nadia keeps a small framed photo of that first real visit on her nightstand now — all of us crowded around Miles’s wheelchair, chocolate pie balanced awkwardly on a hospital tray table, everyone’s smile just slightly too wide for a normal family photo.
“I thought I was about to expose something awful,” she told me once, months after that first frantic sprint through our front door. “Turns out I just found the actual best part of the whole story, hiding behind a briefcase and a bad excuse.”
