Loretta gave it to me in the June. Not the letter — she has kept the letter, and I have let her, and I do not entirely know why either of us agreed to that.
The photograph is creased across one corner from being in a drawer for eight and a half years and it has her thumbprint worn into the bottom left of it, which you can see if you hold it up, because she held it the same way every September.
I had the original. That is the thing people always
get wrong when I tell them this.
I was not sending him my only copy in 2017 — I had three prints and I sent one, because I was twenty-nine and frightened and I thought a photograph would do what a phone call could not.
So there are two of that image in the world now and I have both, and one of them lived in my house in a box with their hospital bands, and the other one lived in a drawer forty minutes from where their father was asleep.
