I had found the photograph on the second night, near two in the morning, with Leander asleep on my chest and a box of Nicolas’s family pictures open on the floor beside me — pictures his own mother had passed down and he had never once looked through, because Nicolas was not a man who looked backward, only forward, always toward the next thing he did not yet have.

And there it was, near the bottom of the box: Augustus, born 1952, three days old in a christening gown, staring up out of the past with my son’s exact face.

The dark hair.

The wide eyes.

The stubborn set of the chin.

I had sat on the nursery floor and looked from the photograph to the baby and back, and I had wept, though not from relief, because by then I already knew Leander was Nicolas’s and had never doubted it.