If no one else would, I would.

He was not my son.

But he was a child, and children belong to all of us, and I was not going to let them make him vanish.

I have kept a small thing, in the years since, that I have told almost no one about.

Somewhere in my house, in a drawer I do not open often, there is a single sheet of paper on which I once wrote down everything I could learn about Bruno — his full name, his birthday, the dinosaurs, the orange popsicles, the cartoon dog who was also a firefighter, every small ordinary fact of a small ordinary boy that his own mother’s crime and my own husband’s cover-up had nearly succeeded in erasing.

I did not write it for any legal purpose.