He was quiet for a long time, listening, before he finally responded.
⸻
“Yeah,” he said. “Actually, yeah, that makes sense. Thank you for telling me that. I think I needed to hear it, honestly, more than I expected to.”
⸻
When he came back inside, he explained that his grandmother, his father’s own mother, had carried an identical mark her entire life, in the exact same spot, something his mother remembered clearly from family photographs even decades later.
⸻
“It’s just genetics,” Desmond told me, sitting down beside me on the couch, watching Iris sleep against my shoulder. “A family trait, apparently going back at least three generations before Iris. Nothing more complicated than that.”
⸻
“How does it feel?” I asked. “Knowing that now?”
