“Come meet her,” I said.
She came.
She held Josephine very carefully, like something she wasn’t sure she deserved.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, to the baby or to me or to both of us.
“I should have told you.”
“I know.”
“I was trying to protect him.”
“I know that too.”
She looked up.
“Are you going to be able to forgive me?”
I thought about it honestly.
“I think so.
Not yet.
But I think so.”
She nodded and looked back down at Josephine, who had gone to sleep with the absolute confidence of someone who had no idea how complicated the world she’d arrived in was.
—
Diane sent flowers to the hospital.
A small arrangement, yellow and white, with a card that said: *Congratulations.
She’s lucky to have you.
— D and Daniel.*
I kept the card.
—
In the weeks that followed, I learned what it meant to be a person who had lost everything and was somehow still required to continue.
I fed Josephine at two in the morning and three in the morning and sometimes four-thirty, and in those quiet hours I talked to her in the dark — not about anything important, just whatever was in my head.
The way Mark used to hum when he was washing dishes.
The particular smell of the porch in summer.
The fact that he had once driven forty minutes in the wrong direction because he refused to admit the GPS was right, and they had laughed about it for years afterward.
I told her about Daniel.
“You have a brother,” I said one night, while she was eating and the rest of the world was asleep.
“He’s five, and he builds rockets, and he has your dad’s eyes.
You’ll meet him when you’re older.
I’ll make sure of it.”
She didn’t respond, because she was six days old and had other priorities.
But I said it out loud, and that made it real.
—
Ruth came three times a week.
She brought food, held the baby, and did the dishes without being asked.
We didn’t talk about Mark’s secret again for a long time.
We didn’t need to.
We were both living inside the consequences of it, and that was enough.
One afternoon she was washing up at the sink and I was feeding Josephine on the sofa, and she said, without turning around:
