‘A Bigger, Better Chance’

Ms. Boyce-Gaskins decided to pick up her brother that weekend, to take him to her home near Atlanta. I asked Mr. Daley, who liked the winter, how he felt about leaving.

“Very well,” he said, before pausing. “Somewhat distressed,” he continued. “Pretty much, the danger’s far away, but not exactly destroyed. A bigger, better chance.”

Ms. Boyce-Gaskins left work that Friday and rode the train all night, arriving at Mr. White’s apartment around 5 p.m. the next day. When she saw her brother for the first time in four years, she asked him if she could hug him. “Yes,” he said.

Mr. Daley would later tell his sister that seeing her made him feel “sort of like Santa Claus.”

After greeting each other, they walked outside, sat on the building’s stoop and smoked a half pack of cigarettes, talking about their lives. On Sunday morning, Ms. Boyce-Gaskins washed her brother’s feet, and she got him into the shower.

He was different with her than anyone I had ever seen him with, calm and trusting. When she told him not to smoke around company, he listened. When she told him that she had his back, he gave her a fist-bump. She told him that they would stop by the hospital before taking the bus home to Georgia. He grimaced but did not say no.

“Just to get the meds,” she told him. “We’re not staying.”

“We’re leaving,” he replied.

“Indeed,” she said. “We need some meds, and we don’t want the kind that make you shake. O.K.?”

“All right,” he agreed.

At home in Douglasville, Ga., she said, her husband was getting a room ready for Mr. Daley. Their daughter, 12, and nephew, 13, whom they are raising, were happy that she had finally found her brother. Ms. Boyce-Gaskins planned to enroll him in an outpatient program for people with mental illnesses.