Because here is what Vanessa never understood about my husband.
Jack grew up in the foster system.
Moved from house to house, bag always half-packed, never kept, never chosen.
He used to tell me he had exactly one good memory from all of those years.
An older girl, in one of the early homes, when he was five or six.
A girl who used to fold him paper cranes out of whatever paper she could find — candy wrappers, church bulletins, the backs of worksheets — and tuck them under his pillow while he slept.
“You are not alone,” she would tell him. “As long as you have one of these, you are not alone. I made it, so part of me is always with you.”
Then one day the system moved her somewhere else, the way it eventually moved everyone, and he never saw her again.
He was too little to hold onto her last name.
