He ran his finger over the old picture.
“She stayed awake beside me all night.”
Grandpa looked toward the telescope.
“And tomorrow morning I have to go into that hospital without her for the first time.”
Suddenly everything made sense.
“I didn’t want you in my bed,” he said with a small laugh. “I prepared that bed for you.”
He pointed toward the smaller one across the room.
“I just didn’t want to spend the last night before surgery alone.”
Dad looked away.
His eyes were red.
“Why didn’t you ask me?”
Grandpa smiled at him.
“Because you would spend the entire night checking my blood pressure and telling me to sleep.”
Despite everything, Dad laughed.
Then Grandpa turned to me.
“And because tonight there’s supposed to be a meteor shower.”
I looked at the telescope.
“You remembered?”
When I was a little girl, Grandpa had promised that someday we would stay awake all night and watch shooting stars together.
We had never done it.
“I’ve been waiting twenty years,” he said.
That night Dad stayed too.
He took the sofa in the next room while Grandpa and I lay on separate beds beside the window.
Around two in the morning, Grandpa whispered:
“Emily?”
“Yeah?”
“Still awake?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
A few minutes later, the first streak of light crossed the sky.
Then another.
Then dozens.
I ran to the telescope.
“Grandpa! Come look!”
But when I turned around, he wasn’t watching the sky.
He was watching me.
“What?”
He smiled.
“Nothing. I just wanted to remember your face tonight.”
My throat tightened.
Around three-thirty, I asked him the question I had been afraid to ask.
“Are you scared about tomorrow?”
For once, Grandpa didn’t pretend to be brave.
“Yes.”
I sat beside his bed.
He reached for my hand.
“Your grandmother used to say courage isn’t being unafraid. It’s having someone beside you while you’re afraid.”
We stayed like that until sunrise.
Before leaving for the hospital, Grandpa gave me an envelope.
“Open it after I go.”
Inside was a photograph of me at five years old, asleep against his shoulder.
On the back he had written:
Emily, if I ever made you feel that I was keeping something from you, I was. I was hiding how fragile I had become because I never wanted you to stop seeing me as Grandpa and
