It had brought him home.

I want to say a word about that tearing, because it was not a dramatic gesture and I did not do it in anger.

I did it the way you finally throw out a key to a house you no longer own — calmly, with a kind of quiet finality, because keeping it serves nothing.

For a few days after the photograph I had felt the pull of the other story, the one where my biology was my destiny, where the discovery that Truett Rennick’s blood ran in me meant that some part of me was his, tainted, monstrous at the root.

It is a seductive story, that one, and a cruel one, and I think a great many people live their whole lives inside it — believing they are doomed to become the worst person whose blood they carry.

My father’s whole life was the refutation of it.