And then, later, when it had gone the way it went, he asked me.
His girlfriend had left in the November. There was nobody else. And they had told him what they tell people when the numbers are what his were.
Leo is not the child of a married man or a man twice my age.
He is my brother’s son.
I was three weeks along when I told them because I knew the exact date of the transfer. It was in a diary.
If I end this, it won’t just be me it happens to.
I meant that there would be nothing of Rhys left at all. I was nineteen and that was the best sentence I could find and it was a terrible one.
He passed that June.
I did not know.
I had changed my number and moved states and my mother had no way of reaching me that she was willing to use.
I found out three weeks afterwards from a cousin who tracked down the girl whose room I was renting.
I missed my own brother’s funeral.
And that is why my parents’ hands were shaking on that porch.
Because for ten years they have believed that their son died at twenty-three and left nothing behind him at all.
And on the wall of that hallway, four feet from where Leo was standing, there is a photograph of Rhys at ten years old.
Same jaw.
