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Milo and Silas share a room now, at my insistence, twin beds pushed close enough together that I regularly find them both asleep in the same one most mornings anyway, exactly the way I imagine they might have grown up together all along, if eight years hadn’t been stolen from both of them by two adults who decided, quietly and without anyone’s permission, that the truth was simply too inconvenient to bother telling.
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I think about that school office often now, the exact moment I turned around and saw Renata Kessler standing in the doorway, understanding, all at once, that the son I’d grieved for eight years had never actually been gone — just carefully, deliberately hidden, less than twenty miles away, by two people who apparently believed a lie could simply be maintained forever, provided nobody ever thought to look closely enough to notice the matching birthmark sitting in the exact same spot on two boys who were never supposed to meet at all.
