“I told her I thought about her every day since Hancock, when Esther told me, in a room that smelled of blood, that what I’d longed for was real. She said she’d come back, and maybe I’d be ready to go with her. And now it is that year, and she’s in a bedroom upstairs, and I am ready. You cannot always be in Leningrad. You are allowed to hope for something that doesn’t just save, something that builds.”
