Susan Ito, LM’s Life in the Sandwich columnist, has published an online version of, “The Lost Story,” in the Readerville Journal.

Thomas Wolfe’s tale of a lost brother broke open the heart of a woman whose name I don’t remember. And in the dark humid night, while everyone else slept, she gave me the key that binds us all together, those of us who have lost things, who have known suffering and joy and those moments that melt in the smallest instant and then disappear. Stories are a way of holding those moments, either true or imagined, of finding once again the brother with the berry-colored birthmark, the father who smiled through a cloud of sawdust, the anon­ymous evening when we sparked into being.