He had stood beside frightened mothers and overwhelmed fathers and newborns who arrived too early, too quiet, or too fragile. People trusted him precisely because he did not shake, did not panic, and did not allow the fear in a room to become his own. That was the thing about Robert Wright — he had made a professional life out of steadiness, and he had been good at it for a very long time.
“Until Delivery Room Four, on a gray winter morning.”
The baby was tiny, angry at the cold, his small fists curled beside his cheeks in the universal posture of the newly arrived. Damp dark hair against a red face. The kind of perfect, furious new life that Robert had witnessed hundreds of times and had learned to receive with professional warmth.
“Then the blanket slipped.”
Just below the baby’s left collarbone, where the fabric had shifted aside, was a birthmark. Shaped like a broken crescent — pale at the edges, darker at the center, like a small moon interrupted by shadow.
Robert stopped breathing.
For one impossible moment, he was not in a hospital in the middle of a winter morning. He was twenty-five years in the past, holding another newborn with the same mark in the same place. A child who had disappeared. A child he had spent two and a half decades telling himself might still be alive somewhere.
“Doctor?”
The nurse’s voice came from a distance.
