I opened it.
It was a hospital bracelet. The one for fathers. The one he never came back to get at check-in.
“I went back to the hospital,” he said. “I asked the nurses if they still had it. The one with our names. I know it’s stupid. They thought I was crazy. But one of them, the nurse with the purple scrubs, she remembered you. And she found it in a drawer at the nurses’ station. She said she’d kept it because she had a feeling someone would come back for it.”I held the little plastic bracelet in my fingers. It had his name and the hospital’s name and a barcode and the same number that was on my bracelet and on Evelyn’s tiny ankle bracelet.
Mother, father, daughter. A set.
I looked at Ben. He was crying again, very quietly, trying not to.
