For several long seconds, he simply stared at the baby without any expression I could read at all.

Then, carefully, almost clinically, he adjusted the edge of her blanket and looked more closely at the small of her back, where there was a faint reddish mark, roughly the size of a coin.

And my brother’s face went completely blank.

And in a voice with no warmth in it, no life in it, a voice I had never heard him use in thirty years of being his twin, he said: “I’m sorry.

I can’t take her home.”