I sat by that window for a long time after we hung up.
Yes, I’d like that.
Four words. Simple and quiet and entirely true, and the fact that they were entirely true was the thing I was still sitting with when the city outside shifted from late night into early morning and the light changed and I realized I had been staring at nothing for the better part of an hour. I had meant it. I wanted to see the photograph. I wanted to see Elena Bennett laughing in a garden in 1987, arm in arm with a man who had written our girl on the back and then let her be taken away anyway. I wanted to hold that photograph in my hands and understand, in the way you only understand things you can touch, exactly where all of this had started.
What I was less sure about was what it meant that I wanted it so much.
