“You’ll see it when she wakes.

She has our sister’s exact smile.”

My brother stood there with his fingertip against his niece’s forehead and wept, openly, in the lobby of a county placement center, this man who had once prided himself on never showing anything.

And I did not look away and I did not tell him to compose himself.

I let my brother cry, because he was crying for Evelyn, for the fourteen months we had lost, for the nine years before that, for all of it, and because there are moments in a life when the only correct thing to do is to stand beside someone and let the grief come.

We had never done that for each other, Arthur and I, not once in our whole lives.