We had a witness now, sleeping in my arms, who made all of that unbearably beside the point.

“But we’re not letting her daughter be forgotten,” I said.

“That’s the part we still get to decide.

We failed Evelyn.

We can’t undo that, and we’re going to carry it.

But her daughter is right here, and she is alive, and she is ours, and we are not going to fail her too.” Arthur looked at me, and he nodded, and in that nod nine years of feud simply ended, not with a grand reconciliation or a settling of accounts, but with two brothers agreeing, over their sister’s sleeping child, that some things are more important than being right.

It astonishes me still how quickly it happened, once it happened at all.