There was a portrait in the Professor’s office in the desk drawer that required a key. The key was affixed to the bottom of the humidor, and the humidor was a plain oak box from the previous century whose interior compartments were lined with a sickly green felt that had been nicked and scratched with use. Along with its first population of cigars, it had been a graduation present. In the years and successes since, the Professor said he’d had far better than those first cigars, but none as satisfying. It was a sentiment about what is treasured that had always distinguished him from my first father, and two years later, when I was recalled to the Vault, I would not forget the conversation we had the day I came into his office to find him staring into that drawer.

“The greatest inventions are not born of necessity or genius,” he said. “They are born of pain.”

He withdrew a thick black card, the portrait held inside by sliding its corners into slits made in the parchment. At first he studied it without moving, and I held my breath to keep from disrupting him.

“Or perhaps that’s only true of mine.” He approached my seat then, and in his hands he held the card closed, pressing it between his forefingers and thumbs as though to make a border from the impressions.

I offered my hand when he seemed hesitant, but instead of extending the card, the Professor bent before me.

“You are a miracle, ma petite, and nothing will change that. It is I who am not what I appear. And I wanted you to know.”

The story, as a real person might say, was in the picture, but the picture alone could not have told it, so he waited while I opened the card and saw for the first time what had been his inspiration.

A baby girl lay posed in a bassinette, half her body propped up on a generous pillow. She was dressed in a beautiful nightgown, long enough to conceal her legs and feet. I couldn’t be sure how old she was in days or weeks, as her size was dwarfed by her surroundings, but judging by the sparseness of her fine hair, I thought she must be newly born. Her eyes were closed, her hands lying peacefully over her abdomen. She could have been a doll, but for one certainty.

“This child is dead.”

The Professor nodded and took back the card, closing it and turning again toward the open drawer.

“Did she belong to you?”

“Camille and I,” he said, before looking at me with a smile from some other time. “But she belonged more to Camille, I think. I remember thinking that she would have loved me, in time, because of how her mother did. And though I never got to see it, I will always be grateful to Cam for that.”