“You’d do that with me?” he said.
“We’d do it together,” I said.
He nodded.
“What if he doesn’t want to see me?” Leo said.
“Then we respect that,” I said. “An apology is for the person being apologized to, not for the person apologizing. If Sam doesn’t want to receive it, that’s his right and we honor it.”
“And if he does?” Leo said.
“Then you tell him the truth,” I said. “Not the full story. He doesn’t need the full story. But you tell him what you did was wrong and that you’re sorry.”
“Without making it about me,” Leo said.
“Without making it about you,” I said.
He was quiet for a moment.
“Can I look at these?” he said, gesturing at the photographs.
“Yes,” I said.
He went through them slowly, picking each one up and looking at it before setting it down, in the careful way he handled things that mattered to him.
“He really was funny,” Leo said, looking at one of them.
“Which one?” I said.
“This one,” he said. He held up the photograph from the birthday party, the one where Danny was laughing at something outside the frame.
“He laughed like that for real,” I said. “With his whole body.”
“What was funny?” Leo said.
“I don’t remember,” I said. “Something his friend Marcus said, probably. Marcus always made him laugh.”
“Marcus,” Leo said. “Like my friend Marcus.”
“Yes,” I said. “Danny’s Marcus was different. He had known Danny since they were both teenagers. He gave the eulogy at Danny’s funeral.”
“What did he say?” Leo said.
I thought about Marcus at the lectern, forty-one years old and holding a single piece of paper that he had written on both sides.
“He said Danny made him better at being a person,” I said. “He said he had known Danny for twenty-five years and in that time he had watched Danny navigate things that would have made Marcus give up, and do it with a specific combination of stubbornness and grace that he had never seen in anyone else. He said he was embarrassed by how much he had learned from someone people mostly pitied, and that the embarrassment was good because it meant he had been paying attention.”
