tighten.
Blue-gray.
Exactly like mine.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m Ivan,” I said. “I used to know your mother.”
That was technically true, though painfully incomplete.
There had been a time when I knew how Jessi liked her coffee, which song she hummed while cooking dinner, and why she always left one lamp glowing whenever I was deployed.
The boy noticed the Army patch stitched onto my coat.
“Were you a soldier?”
“Yes.”
His face brightened with obvious curiosity, but Jessi quickly asked him to check the cookies in
