“It has been for ten years.” He looked from the children to me and back, and his mouth worked, and what he finally managed was the smallest and most honest question he had asked me in a decade.

“How old are they?”

Chapter 7 — The Frame

I told him.

I did not soften it, and I did not sharpen it into a weapon; I simply laid it down between us like a thing too heavy to keep carrying.

The twins, Wes and Ira, were nine — born six months after he signed the decree, in a base hospital in Germany, while he was here believing whatever he had been told.

Abe came the year after, from a weekend we had spent in Savannah trying, both of us, to save something already lost.