He hoped I would take over the foundation.
“You are the only person alive,” he had written, “who already knows the whole secret of how it works. You figured it out at seventeen, in the rain, with ten dollars and a question. I just spent the rest of my life trying to be worthy of the lesson you taught me by accident. Please keep asking people their names, Elena. It turns out it’s the whole thing.”
I sat in my little office and cried the way you cry when twenty-seven years rearranges itself in a single breath —
when the stupidest thing you ever did turns out to have been the thing that saved a man’s life, and now, impossibly, is about to save your daughter’s.
Chapter 5: What’s Your Name
Claire got her treatment.
I want to say that first, plainly, because for two years it was the only sentence I had been praying to be able to say, and Samuel is the reason I can.
