He came home with it folded in his backpack, tucked between a spelling worksheet and a drawing of what appeared to be either a dinosaur or a very ambitious dog. I found it during the after-school routine, the unpacking and the snack and the brief daily debrief that Ethan conducted with the thoroughness of a project manager reviewing a completed sprint. He told me about the science lesson and the disagreement at lunch about whether a hot dog was a sandwich, which he had strong opinions on, and I listened and made the appropriate responses and did not yet know what was in the folded paper.
He pulled it out himself. Set it on the kitchen table between us, smoothed the crease with both hands in the precise way he smoothed things.
A family tree. The template his teacher had provided, branches
