Prologue
Prologue
September 1966 — Six Weeks After an Angel’s Birth
Joyce Louise Bensoussan
The train ride back from upstate was quiet. Patti sat beside me, her knees pressed together, her hands folded like she was still in the chapel. We didn’t speak. Not because there was nothing to say, but because everything had already been said—between the walls of that home, in the hush of night, in the way we passed Leo from one pair of arms to another.
She promised. No contact. No letters. No photographs. She would raise him as her own, and I would disappear from his story like a ghost who never learned to haunt.
My parents met me at the station in silence. My father nodded once. My mother didn’t look at me. They had already arranged the next step. Michael was waiting at the courthouse, dressed in a suit that didn’t fit and a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. I signed the papers. I wore the ring. I became someone else.
But I remember everything.
I remember Levi’s voice on the beach, the way he said my name like it was a promise. I remember the sound of gravel under my father’s tires as we left East Hampton. I remember Maureen’s face when they let her go, and the way Levi’s mother didn’t cry—she just folded her apron and walked out the back door.
I remember Leo’s cry. The first one. The last one I heard.
Patti said he looked like me. I said he looked like Levi. We were both right.
Now, back in Glen Cove, the leaves are starting to turn. The air smells like endings. I sit by the window and watch them fall—one by one, slow and deliberate, like they know something I don’t.
I pick up my pen. I begin to write.
Because even if I can’t speak, I can still remember.
And even though I gave up everything, I will not let the story die.
Not while the leaves still fall.
