Leo had never met Danny.
He knew he had an uncle who died before he was born, because I had told him this as a fact when he was old enough to understand facts about family structure, but I had not told him much beyond that, not because I was protecting Danny’s memory from Leo specifically, but because grief has its own timeline and the grief for Danny had been something I carried in a particular way, the way you carry things that do not have a clean resolution, and I had not found the right moment to bring it forward.
Or I had told myself this.
It is possible that what I had been doing was not waiting for the right moment but avoiding the conversation that the right moment would require.
Leo looked at the photographs.
He looked at the one on top, which was a school photograph of Danny at about ten, the formal background and the good shirt and the specific quality of a school photograph in which a child is not performing anything, just being themselves for the camera.
