Nobody Has to Bleed to Be Heard

“Come in, come in, it’s cold.”

The apartment has photographs on every surface.

Rebecca at eight, at sixteen, at her wedding, in a hospital gown holding a newborn.

Noah walked around that living room for eleven minutes looking at each one and did not say a word and nobody made him.

Her older daughter Teresa was there — Noah’s aunt, forty-four, a hospital administrator, who shook my hand with a flat courtesy that made it extremely clear where things stood, and who did not shake Chloe’s at all.

It was not a warm afternoon.