My mother’s protection of us had cost us him, among everything else, had walled us off from the one relative who might have helped, precisely so that no one could use him or us as leverage.

I understood the necessity of it.

But looking at Arthur’s face, my mother’s face, I could not help mourning, just a little, the uncle I had never been allowed to have, even as I stood at the very beginning of finally being allowed to have him. and the thing that struck me, that stopped me where I stood, was the resemblance.

It was subtle, but it was there, in the shape of his eyes, in something about the brow and the set of the mouth.