But I barely noticed Julian.

I was looking at Arthur Vance, seeing him in person for the first time in my conscious memory, and I felt, standing there, a strange complicated grief that I had not expected, a grief for all the years this man and I had been kept apart.

Because he was my family.

Whatever the reasons, whatever the history, this stranger in the charcoal suit shared my blood and my mother’s face, and he had existed all my life, a few states away, an uncle I might have known, might have grown up with, might have run to in the hard years if the world had been arranged differently.

And it had not been arranged differently.