The therapist was waiting for Maggie outside Bobby D’Amato’s room. I remembered her from the hypnosis session, when she had sensed sorrows in Robert Michael Martin that the rest of us had overlooked. Miranda carried with her an air that was as safe and welcoming as a sanctuary. I stood close to her, letting her aura of tranquility wash over me. I hoped Bobby D’Amato would be able to feel it, too. I did not know how this woman found the ability to radiate such serenity when she spent so much of her time around other people’s pain, but she had a gift, and I was glad for it. Bobby D’Amato would need it.

“Ready?” Maggie asked her. They had already spoken by phone. Miranda was prepared. They entered the room together.

Bobby D’Amato was lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, trying hard to keep his mind blank, with no inkling that he had not been alone in the room—the now-familiar little boy apparition stood solemnly by his bed. He looked at no one but Bobby.

“Bobby?” Maggie asked softly as she approached him. “How are you feeling?”

“Is that my name? Bobby?”

“Yes,” Maggie told him. “Bobby D’Amato. Do you not remember?”

I could feel a slash of pain as deep as a knife wound surface in him. He’d known who he was; that was why he had visited his own grave the day I spotted him at the cemetery, hiding in the trees. He just couldn’t face who he had become. “I don’t like remembering,” he said.

But he was remembering. Like a touchstone that would keep him safe, his mind was returning again and again to the moment in that small bathroom in the cedar-shingled house by the lake when Tyler Matthews had reached out and placed his chubby little hand on Bobby’s head, trying to steady himself. It had been such a small gesture, and yet it had a power I did not fully understand. Perhaps it was his proof, I thought, the one scrap of proof he had that he was not the soul-destroying monster that the man who had called himself Colonel Vitek had raised him to be.

I’ll admit it: I had no compassion for anyone when I was alive. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself. But compassion fascinates me now. It transforms ordinary people into avatars for what human beings can be at their best. When people are filled with compassion, it opens their senses to so much more than they might feel otherwise. It’s almost as if a conduit opens between two hearts and souls, giving a glimpse of what we would be if we could be bigger than ourselves. I saw the power of compassion before me now: although neither Maggie nor Miranda could possibly know what Bobby D’Amato was thinking, both seemed to know exactly what he needed to hear.

“Do you remember what I told you earlier this morning?” Maggie asked him gently. “That the boy was home safe with his mother? He’s safe.”

Bobby nodded, eyes tightly shut. A tidal wave of emotions was overwhelming his ability to hear or see or think. But beneath this flood of regret and pain and fear, far beneath the surface, I felt a tiny spark of hope.

I felt him thinking yet again of the little hand placed on his head, and his breathing grew more even. That was when I finally understood. That moment when he had made a choice, when he had decided to break away from the colonel at long last? It was his spark of hope. Reliving it was his mantra, his assurance that it had been real.

“I don’t want you to worry about anything but getting well right now,” Maggie said. “We’ll work it out. Can you put those worries aside?”

No. Of course he could not. But it helped him to hear it.

“Bobby?” the therapist said quietly. “My name is Miranda. Maggie has asked me to be here as your advocate. To make sure you feel safe and feel comfortable, because a lot is going to happen to you now. Your life is going to change.”

“Good.” It was only one word, but he meant it.

Miranda took Bobby’s hand, and he did not pull away. I could feel her empathy washing over him like a gentle wave, easing his pain. “Did you know that for the last sixteen years, your parents have never stopped looking for you?” she asked. “They’ve never given up hope.”

His body thrashed back and forth as if he was in unbearable pain.

Miranda’s voice was soothing, almost hypnotic. “They’re on their way here. They want to see you.” Something in Bobby twanged: it was shame as dark and deep as an ocean. “They know what’s happened to you. They love you so much. They need to see you and know that you are safe. They’re so glad that you are safe.”

As Miranda continued to talk, repeating the words you are safe over and over, the little boy specter standing by the bed inched closer, as if drawn in by her voice. His blank eyes remained fixed on Bobby’s face as the therapist continued to talk, telling Bobby of how proud his parents were that he had had the courage to stand up to the colonel, that he had not harmed Tyler Matthews. A strange connection grew between the little boy and Bobby D’Amato in those few seconds. I could actually see it, though I am certain the others could not. It was like a tarnished gold ribbon that wound through the air, connecting a point on Bobby’s breastbone with a similar point on the boy’s. It was barely a shimmer, but it grew thicker and stronger with each word Miranda spoke. As the connection grew, I felt the fear in Bobby start to dissolve. The shame he carried started to crumble and dissolve. I felt the stranglehold of self-hate loosen and peace settle over him. Bobby’s eyes were closed, but his heart opened, even if just a little.

The little boy disappeared.

He turned as translucent as smoke, and then he was a ripple of light pulsing through the air, and then he was gone.

I knew he would not be coming back. I understood at last what he was. I knew why he did not seem like me, why he had not been able to leave Bobby D’Amato alone.

He wasn’t some victim Bobby had tortured. He wasn’t some child the colonel had killed. He was Bobby D’Amato. He was the little boy who had died that morning sixteen years ago when a man had held out his hand to a trusting four-year-old trying to find his parents’ car and said, “I know where they are. Come with me.”

That silent apparition, devoid of all interest in others, capable of existing but just barely, was the child Bobby D’Amato had never been. The specter had been a deformed, lost soul, and perhaps there are some that would have called it an abomination.

I thought of it as an angel interrupted.

I was glad it had found its way home.

The knock on the hospital door was barely audible, but Maggie was waiting for it. “They’re here,” she told the therapist.

“Would you like me to stay with you?” Miranda asked Bobby. He held her slender hand, squeezing it tightly. She nodded and sat in a chair by his side, the only anchor he had in the entire world as he faced the life he had lost.

Morty was the first to poke his head in the door. “Come in,” Maggie said to him brightly, then bit her lip as if she felt her mood was unseemly.

Morty was in full dress uniform, and he moved as carefully as if he were escorting the president. He opened the door and held out his arm. Rosemary D’Amato stepped through, stumbled, and was quickly steadied by a stocky man behind her. Bobby’s father. He looked as fearful as his wife. They had lived on hope for so long that hope was all they had, and the possibility that it might be taken from them, that a mistake might have been made somehow, was too much to bear.

But then Rosemary D’Amato saw the man lying in the hospital bed, and she gasped. “You look just like my brother,” she whispered. She appealed to her husband for the confirmation they both desperately needed. “He looks just like Dave, doesn’t he?”

Her husband nodded mechanically, his eyes never leaving his son’s face. Sixteen years of silence, of bearing the pain inside, broke in him. He rushed to Bobby and knelt, laying his head on the bed beside his son, hiding his face from the view of others. His body trembled with the sobs he could not hold back.

Bobby shifted awkwardly—and then he reached out and placed his hand on top of his father’s head to comfort him. It changed everything.

His hope had been passed on.

Bobby’s mother joined her husband and patted his back gently as she gazed at her son. “I knew you were alive,” she told him. “I knew you were out there somewhere. I looked for you everywhere.”

Bobby said nothing. He did not know what to say.

The therapist looked up at Maggie and Morty, then nodded. Silently, they left the room. I stayed. I needed to know Bobby D’Amato would make it.

His mother was crying now, too. She clutched her son’s hand, and her tears fell on the thin, white sheet that covered him. She was trying to say something, but the words would not come. Her husband sobbed quietly in the silence.

Bobby was staring at his mother, searching her face. “I saw you at the graveyard,” he finally said, his voice trembling with the certainty that she would be furious at him. “I was trying to find my grave, and I saw you there, visiting it, and I didn’t come up and say anything. But I knew who you must be.”

“It’s okay,” she told him without hesitation. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except that you’re alive and we’re together. It’s going to be okay. I promise you that. It’s going to be okay.”

It’s going to be okay. Mothers’ words, the kind they murmur when nothing else can be said. But I could feel she was right. It was going to be okay. They had come to their son without hesitation and without fear, even without forgiveness, because, in their minds, there was nothing in the world he could have done that would call for their forgiveness. They had come prepared to love him no matter what. And Bobby D’Amato could feel it. Something deep inside him shifted. Dark memories of terrible times faded. Years of pain fell away. The images in his mind that tormented him receded to a faraway land where, god willing, they would stay. The memory of a family speeding along the highway took their place. I could hear voices united in one single, glorious note as a father, mother, and son sang along to a song on the radio, each one knowing the words and knowing their part. Together, they made a whole new sound, rich with a harmony that delighted the little boy in the backseat. He banged his heels against the cushions and sang about a silver hammer, his heart full of happiness that they were all together, that they belonged, and that he was part of them.

They would get there again. I felt it. It would take time. but, with love, they would get there again.