harsh hospital lighting, his whole face caught somewhere between exhaustion and open wonder. Beside the photograph lay a small plastic hospital bracelet, faded nearly illegible with age. I recognized it instantly, somehow, even before I could actually read the tiny printed name across it.
My own birth bracelet.
Beneath both items sat a folded letter, and its contents finally explained what the photograph and bracelet had already, silently, begun suggesting on their own.
My mother had been nineteen years old. The young man in that photograph had been forced entirely
