He kept the blanket anyway. Not as proof of anything. Not to take out and explain.
Just because it was the first thing that covered him, the first thing someone washed and folded and kept and handed down, the first material evidence of the decision that Michael had made in the mud when he could have walked away and nobody would have blamed him.
The blanket is what it means to be held. And Noah carried it with him for twenty-five years through whatever came, because the holding had been real, and he was not willing to pretend otherwise just because he had grown large enough to stand on his own.
Michael, for his part, had spent twenty-five years accepting that this was something he might never see clearly. He had not done what he did for gratitude. He had done it because the baby cried and he had hands. That was the whole of his theology.
