Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [960]

The man with the child came over to scavenge beside me, and somehow, perhaps because of the child, because this stranger in his filthy rags was someone’s father, too, I didn’t mind. The little boy watched the two of us, his small brown face expressionless. He did look a little like Gregory. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 960

Note

A three-beat emotional swerve: tolerance arrives through analogy (‘someone’s father, too’), then is undercut by the boy’s blank face, then reopened by a resemblance that is probably grief rather than fact. The unfinished last sentence withholds the comparison it invites the reader to complete.