Before he left that night, Monique said, "There's something else. In Marcus's phone — I finally went through the old backups last month. There were photos from Beckley. I didn't open most of them. But there was one. A man in a hospital bed, thin, smiling a little. And Marcus beside him. I can show you. Or I can delete them. Your call."
Thomas's mouth went dry. "Show me."
She brought the laptop to the picnic table. The photo loaded slowly over the neighborhood Wi-Fi. And there he was — Andrew, older than the boy in the easel photograph, older than the brother in Thomas's memory, wasted by illness but unmistakably himself. The bird-wing somehow still in the set of his mouth. Marcus beside him, hand on the rail of the bed, face turned toward the camera with an expression of such plain tenderness that Thomas had to look away and then look back.
"He looks like Dad," Thomas whispered. "At the end. I never noticed that when we were young."
"He looks like someone who was loved," Monique said. "That's what I see."
Thomas asked her to print the photo. She did, the next day, on the hospital's good color printer, and he put it in a simple frame on his mantel beside the picture of their parents on their wedding day. Visitors to his house would see a thin man in a hospital bed and not know the story. That was fine. Thomas knew. Knowing was the point.
---
Summer.