I remember the old, soft edge of a snapshot I had carried since I turned eighteen.
I crossed that room in front of a hundred and twenty people.
I stopped in front of David.
He held his half toward me.
I held mine toward him.
The torn edges met.
They fit the way two hands fit when you fold them.
On his half, a skinny boy in an Ohio State T-shirt grinned at the camera with his arm around a girl.
On mine, the girl laughed at something just outside the picture, and the boy’s hand rested on her shoulder.
It was the same hand.
The same crooked little finger, the one I’d seen a thousand times, curled around a coffee mug at my kitchen table.
“Marie was nineteen,” David said, very quietly, for me now, though everyone could hear. “She went home to Toledo that fall, and she never told me. You were born March third, 1980, and placed with a couple named Ruth and Frank Novak through Lutheran Social Services.”
