Kyle had watched the clip again.
Then again.
He had seen Frank’s initials on the sailboat corner, and something in him had remembered the hospital.
He had remembered his father asking for the cigar box.
He had remembered that I came home from that visit with my eyes swollen and my purse held tightly against my side.
“Mom,” he said, and now the word sounded like an apology trying to find a shape. “Is it Dad’s?”
I looked at the blanket in my lap.
My anger had cooled by then into something harder.
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
Madison said something in the background.
Kyle told her to stop.
It was the first time I had heard my son draw a line with his wife and not immediately sand it down.
I took the seam ripper from my drawer.
The tool was old, silver, and narrow, and I had used it for decades to undo mistakes one thread at a time.
