Arthur Vance.

And I knew that name.

I had not heard it spoken aloud in fifteen years, but I knew it.

Arthur Vance was my mother’s brother.

My uncle.

The uncle my family had cut off, and been cut off from, before I was old enough to really remember him.

The estrangement had always been presented to me, in the few times it came up at all, as a simple hard fact, the kind of family rupture that needs no explanation because such things happen: people fall out, families break, an uncle becomes a name you do not say.

I had never questioned it, the way children never question the fixed features of the world they are handed.