Sixteen years ago I found a stranger’s baby in a car trunk — I never imagined she’d been left there for me.

I have not been far away, Marcus. I want to be honest about that too. Part of the arrangement was sixteen years of distant, careful watching — never close enough to be seen, never so far that if something had gone wrong, someone couldn’t have stepped in. You passed every single check, every year, without ever knowing you were being tested. The birthday parties. The stitches when she fell off her bike at seven. The way you took a second job the year she needed a hearing aid and never once made her feel like a burden for needing it. I know all of it. I have a folder of photographs I was allowed one glimpse of a year, just to remember what I was protecting her toward.