The archived sample from three years ago.

Three years ago was the second loss. Three years ago was the beginning of the quiet that ended us. Whatever the lab had matched, it reached back into the exact wound we’d spent two years pretending had closed.

I could have opened the envelope. It was six inches away, my name on it in her careful hand. Every frightened part of me argued that she’d never know, that I’d only be arriving early to a truth she’d already decided to give me.

But I thought of what she’d said at the table — choice is only real when it lasts past the emergency — and I understood that reading it tonight would prove her right about the version of me she’d described to Lena.

The man who took what he wasn’t given. The man who managed his own fear at her expense.

So I left it under the folder with its one white corner showing, and in the morning I drove her to St. Vincent without having read a word.