“Please tell me what’s happening,” I said.
He sat down slowly in the chair beside my bed, our daughter still cradled carefully against his chest, and was quiet for a long moment before he finally spoke.
“My father had a birthmark exactly like this,” he said. “Same size. Same shape. Same exact spot on his left shoulder. I haven’t thought about it in years, honestly. I didn’t expect seeing it again to hit me the way it just did.”
I sat with that for a moment, working through twelve years of marriage during which Desmond had told me remarkably little about his father, beyond the bare fact that the man had left when Desmond was eight years old and never once came back.
“You’ve barely ever talked about him,” I said carefully. “I didn’t even know you remembered small details like that.”
