This was different.
His entire body shook.
“What happened to her?”
Leilani came closer.
“My mother lived to be eighty-six.”
Grandpa closed his eyes.
A sound escaped him.
Half sob.
Half laugh.
“She lived?”
“Yes.”
“She had a good life?”
“A very good one.”
“Children?”
“Three.”
“Grandchildren?”
“Eight.”
“Great-grandchildren?”
“Fourteen.”
Grandpa pressed both hands over his face.
“Oh.”
One tiny word.
But I understood.
For more than eighty years, Grandpa had not known.
He had carried a little girl from a burning building.
Then war swallowed everything.
He never learned whether she survived her injuries.
Never learned what became of her family.
Never knew that Ruth grew up.
Married.
Had children.
Had grandchildren.
Had great-grandchildren.
An entire family existed partly because an eighteen-year-old boy from Ohio had gone back into a building when every sensible instinct should have told him to run away.
Leilani knelt beside him.
“My mother talked about you until the end.”
