It was, to me, a small monument to being loved recklessly.

And now that same scar had become the thing that unraveled everything, the single mark on a body that no borrowed name and no rehearsed story could erase, because a scar cannot be learned the way a hotel room or a broken wrist can be learned.

It can only be earned, in the flesh, by the person who was actually there.

He could steal his brother’s name and his brother’s history and his brother’s gentle manner, but he could not give himself his brother’s unscarred hip, and he could not take from his own body the mark of the day he had saved me.