And then a boy came around her hip in red socks, holding a cardboard star with one point torn off.

“Mom, it fell off again, can we—”

He stopped.

He looked up at a stranger on the porch, and he did the thing children do, which is tilt his head slightly and narrow one eye, and I have seen that exact expression in a photograph of myself at six on a beach at Wrightsville.

And then I saw his eyes.

There is a color that runs in my family.

It is not blue and it is not gray and my grandmother used to call it weather. My father had it.

I have it.

My sister does not.

He had it.

“Who are you?” he said.

“My name’s Ivan.

I used to know your mom.”

Which was true, and which is the most cowardly sentence I have ever said in my life.