Louis stood on one side.
I stood on the other.
When we finished, Mom reached for both our hands.
“I had two children,” she said.
“I should have said that aloud long ago.”
Louis squeezed her fingers.
“Say it now.”
She smiled.
“I have two children.”
Mom died peacefully several weeks later with Louis beside her and me on the other side of the bed.
Brenda came to the small service.
She hugged Louis before she hugged me.
Afterward, he tried to give me the envelope, saying the papers belonged with Mom’s other documents.
I pushed it back into his hands.
“She kept those for you.”
He removed the photograph and held it between us.
“Then this part belongs to both of us.”
We had copies made.
Louis kept one beside the birthday cards.
I placed the other in the family album, directly before the first photograph of me as a baby.
Not to rewrite our history.
To stop hiding half of it.
I once believed the tattooed stranger beside my mother’s bed had stolen a place in our family.
The truth was that the place had always been his.
He had simply spent sixty-two years finding his way back to it.
