she loses, and it's going to be worse, because she's going to be old enough to remember it. She's going to be seven or eight, and she's going to watch me go yellow in a hospital bed, and then she's going to go back into the system anyway, at eight, with nobody, when nobody adopts eight-year-olds. And there was a couple. The Renfros. They'd done respite for the county, they'd had you for a weekend in August when I was in the hospital getting scoped, and the caseworker told me they'd asked about you. If you ever came free. And they were thirty-four and thirty-six and they had a house with a yard and a dog and neither of them was going to turn yellow."
He stopped. He looked at the bag in his hand as if he had forgotten what was in it.
"So I asked them to take you," he said. "And I asked that it be closed. No contact. Because I didn't want you to have a grandpa in a hospital somewhere that you had to visit on Sundays and then bury. I wanted you to have a clean start. That's what I called it, in my head. A clean start. Like you were an engine." He shook his head slowly. "I didn't know anything."
"And then you didn't die."
"And then I didn't die." He said it the way another man might confess to a theft. "The treatment didn't work, the first one. I got sick as a dog for eleven months and it came back. And then I just kept on, for a while, not dying, getting worse a little at a time, waiting. And then in 2014 they came out with new pills. Twelve weeks. One a day. I was on the list at the clinic at St. Mary-Corwin, and the state paid for most of it, and I took them, and in 2015 a different young doctor sat me down in a different office and told me I was cured. Cured. He said it like he was giving me a present." Elam looked out at the lot. "I went out to the parking garage after and sat on the bike and I couldn't start it for an hour. I'd done all of it, all of it, so you wouldn't have to watch me die, and I wasn't going to. I'd given you away for nothing."
Cassia stared at the carved letters on the armrest. RJ + T. Somebody had loved somebody enough to sit here with a pocketknife.
"You didn't try to find me," she said. "If you were cured. In 2015. You just... bought dolls?"
"I tried."
"How?"
"I wrote a letter," he said. "Through the agency. That's the only way you can do it, when it's closed. You write to the agency and the agency forwards it to the family and the family decides. I wrote it in 2016. It took me about a year to