But when they brought the stretcher up into the last of the light, the man on it turned his head, and his eyes found me across the yard, and I heard myself make a sound I had never made before.

Because I knew that face.

Older, hollowed, wrecked by more than two decades in the dark — but I knew it.

It was the face from the photograph in my wallet.

It was my father.

There is no preparing for the resurrection of a person you buried when you were nine.