“Then the blanket slipped.”
Just below the baby’s left collarbone, where the fabric had shifted aside, was a birthmark. Shaped like a broken crescent — pale at the edges, darker at the center, like a small moon interrupted by shadow.
Robert stopped breathing.
For one impossible moment, he was not in a hospital in the middle of a winter morning. He was twenty-five years in the past, holding another newborn with the same mark in the same place. A child who had disappeared. A child he had spent two and a half decades telling himself might still be alive somewhere.
“Doctor?”
The nurse’s voice came from a distance.
On the bed, Joanna noticed. She was exhausted from labor, her body still trembling with the aftermath of it, but she lifted her head with the particular alertness that arrives in new mothers before anything else does — the fierce, animal awareness of something being wrong.
“Is something wrong with my baby?”
Robert opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He pressed the back of his hand against his eyes for a moment, then pushed his shaking hand into his coat pocket where the nurse couldn’t see it.
“Nothing is wrong with him,” he managed. His voice sounded like someone else’s.
