There is a small pit in the skin just in front of her right ear. About two millimetres.
He has one. His mother has one. His grandmother had one and so did two of her brothers.
On its own it is nothing. A great many people have one and nothing comes of it.
In that family it is not nothing. In that family it comes with hearing loss, which Moira has on one side and Edan has in both at the top end, and which his grandmother had completely by the time she was fifty.
And in about a third of cases in families like theirs it comes with something in the kidneys, and that is what he came back for.
Because there are things that are done in the first days — a hearing screen, which she had, and a scan, which she had not — and because his grandmother's youngest brother died at thirty-one and nobody at the time connected it to a pit in front of an ear.
