He lived inside his own mind.
He believed himself too old, too set in his ways, too armored for anything as dangerous as love.
Then she arrived.
American. Divorced. Jewish by birth, atheist by conviction—until faith cracked her open. She was a poet. A mother of two boys. Sharp-tongued and fearless. The kind of woman who didn't wait for permission to speak, who could match him word for word and sometimes defeat him.
She wrote to him first. He replied out of courtesy. But courtesy became curiosity. Curiosity became friendship. And friendship, slowly, became something he couldn't name—something that terrified the man who had spent a lifetime explaining the human heart without ever fully opening his own.
For years, he convinced himself that companionship was enough.
She knew better. She always knew.
When her visa expired and England threatened to send her away, he offered her marriage—but only as a legal arrangement. A transaction. Nothing more. He told himself this. He almost believed it.
Then the doctors found the cancer.
Bone. Spreading. Terminal.
And in a hospital room, facing the loss of the woman he had spent years holding at a careful distance, the man who wrote eloquently about love finally understood what it meant to feel it.
He married her again—this time, before God. Not for paperwork. Not for friendship. For love. The love he had locked away for sixty years.
They were given a miracle: a remission. Three years of walking together, laughing together, debating and traveling and simply being alive in each other's presence. He called it "a feast of love." She made him more human than he had ever allowed himself to be.
Then the illness returned.
On her final night,
