He looked at me.
There were some memories that never vanished completely.
But they changed.
They stopped being wounds you fell into and became places you could look back on from safer ground.
On Ethan’s tenth birthday, Robert gave him the family box.
By then Robert’s hair was almost entirely white.
Ethan opened the photographs one by one.
He found the picture of Margaret and Elizabeth beneath the flowering tree.
“Which one is which?”
Robert smiled.
“Your father still gets them mixed up in that photograph.”
“I do not,” Logan protested.
“You absolutely do.”
Ethan examined it.
Then he looked at me.
“Mom, I have her eyebrow.”
Everyone became quiet.
He was right.
That small crease beside his left eyebrow.
The one Robert had noticed seconds after Ethan was born.
The feature that had made an experienced physician cry in the middle of a hospital room.
Robert smiled.
