He spent every Christmas praying that the youngest one — the baby — still had some scrap of a memory of his face, and knowing, a little more each year, that a baby doesn’t keep that.

That he was forgetting, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it.”

I take a breath that shakes on the way in.

“By the time that boy turned eighteen and aged out of the system, the records were sealed.

The addresses were long out of date.

The holiday visits had stopped before he was ten — they always stop; the system means the promise and cannot keep it.

And his family, the only blood he had in the world, was simply gone.