I had told him so many times that I did not hold my adoption against him. But even two years after our first correspondence, his letters to me were filled with regret. He held it against himself, and I did not want him to. How strange, yet not strange at all, that I felt the same urge to protect him that I’d felt toward my adoptive parents. Perhaps it was a sign of how much I already cared about him. Was there some magical, inspired phrase I could snatch out of the stifled air between us, something I could say that would make him lay his guilt to rest, once and for all?