I wrote it because a person’s whole reality can be so easily undone by the powerful — dressed in another child’s coat, filed under another family’s name, dissolved into a settlement and a signature — and I wanted there to be, somewhere in the world, in my own hand, a record that insisted otherwise.

That Bruno Reed had been a real boy.

That he had liked what he liked and laughed how he laughed.

That he had lived, entirely and specifically, before he died, and that no amount of money or power or clever lawyering had managed, in the end, to make him into nothing.

I did not know Bruno.

I could not save him; by the time I even learned his name it was already far too late for saving.