They delivered him to our mother’s employers’ gate. I saw him walking up the driveway. My brother and sister were at school, and our mother was in the main house. I went to him, but my last steps shrinking our gap were slow and heavy. He said my name. I could see he was nervous that I would reject him. I went to him and reached around his body for a hug. I am almost as tall as he is now, but I was small again and his scent came back to me; we were no longer in the driveway but in some apartment I hadn’t thought about in years yet no time had passed at all.

I led him to the main house and saw his eyes take in the proportions of everything, the softness and beigeness of the walls and upholstery, every rug and painting and decorative detail as he trailed me from room to room in the otherwise empty house and I called for my mother. Then she was in front of us, a laundry basket in her hands. She dropped it when she saw him, her face rumpling with a dry cry as he ran to her and held her and she made kittenish whimpers in the fabric of his shirt. In my waking memory, I’d never seen them like this, had no recollection of them touching or even speaking face-to-face, but an intimate familiarity came over us; I felt a river current, a serpentine wind, an artery of lightning pass through my parents and through me. I didn’t know how long they’d be like this, but it didn’t matter; I already felt the moment become eternal.

For now we still live in the cottage until we can save for a bigger place. You may have noticed I haven’t told you the name of the town. That’s because as long as we’re here, we’re vulnerable. Until something changes in the laws and the climate so that people understand we are not the enemy. Our family is whole now, but there is no day that passes without anxiousness that I may come home to find my mother or father have been taken into custody. Or that the one taken could be me.

Our father is doing handiwork and repairs for a friend of our mother’s bosses. When he’s not at his new job, just as my mother and sister have done, and my brother with the pages he handed over, our father has begun to tell me the story of him, of how our family came to be, which I’ve tried to write here, though the stories keep coming, so I know the book of our lives will continue to grow with truth and time.

It’s not that the sum of these pages can tell everything about us. There are things we will never share with one another, that will remain unnamed or unspoken. Things I save for private journals, like how I wonder if I will ever find the kind of love I want, a love that at least at its inception resembles what our parents felt when they discovered each other and trusted each other enough to travel to a new world together. There are innumerable joys left out of these pages. Sorrows too. A life rendered will always be incomplete.