For years I loved teasing him about that picture.
“You look like you’re about to drop me,” I once said while pointing at it.
“I was not going to drop you,” he replied immediately.
“Then why do you look so terrified?”
He rubbed the back of his neck and laughed quietly.
“Because I thought if you sneezed, you might break.”
That awkward teenager in the photo is the man who raised me.
He was seventeen the night I appeared in his life.
According to the story he has told me a hundred times, he was riding home after a late pizza delivery shift. When he reached the fence outside his small house, he noticed something strange sitting in the basket of his old bike.
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