Chapter 4: Diane
I didn't answer right away.
The folder was still open in my hands.
The photographs were still face-up on the desk.
I turned them face-down before I spoke.
"How did you get this number?" I asked.
"My father's phone," Diane said.
"You're in his recent calls.
Quite a few times, actually."
Her voice was steady.
Practiced.
The kind of steady that takes effort.
"What do you want to talk about?" I said.
"I want to talk about the fact that a stranger is standing in my father's house holding a key she was given without my knowledge, about to inherit property that should belong to his family."
"I didn't ask for any of this."
"That's what people say when they want to sound innocent." A pause.
"I'm not accusing you of anything.
Not yet.
I just want to meet.
In person.
Before this goes any further."
I looked around the study.
At the desk.
At the two chairs by the window.
At the small framed photograph on the shelf — Thomas, younger, standing beside a girl of about twelve who was laughing at something off-camera.
"Fine," I said.
"When?"
"Tomorrow.
There's a coffee shop on Mercer Street.
Eleven o'clock."
She hung up before I could respond.
I stood in the study for a long time after that.
Then I picked up the photographs again.
There were four of them.
Thomas, much younger, holding a newborn.
Thomas and a woman I didn't recognize, standing outside what looked like a courthouse.
A hospital photo — the kind they take right after a birth, the baby wrapped tight, the mother exhausted and smiling.
And the last one.
A little girl, maybe three years old, sitting on the floor of what looked like this very study.
She was holding a book open in her lap, looking up at the camera with wide, serious eyes.
On the back of that photograph, in Thomas's handwriting: *My Sarah.
Age 3.*
I set it down very carefully.
My name is Sarah.
I had always known I was adopted.
My parents — the people who raised me — had never hidden it.
They told me when I was seven.
They said my birth parents were young and couldn't care for me, and that they had chosen my parents specifically, carefully, because they wanted me to have a good life.
I had never looked for my birth family.
I hadn't felt the need.
My parents were my parents.
But standing in that study, holding a photograph of a three-year-old girl with my name written on the back, I felt the floor shift slightly under my feet.
I sat down in the chair behind the desk.
I opened the manila folder again and looked at the birth certificate.
Mother: Carol Anne Whitfield.
Father: Thomas Edward Whitfield.
Child: Sarah Marie Whitfield.
Date of birth: mine.
I pressed my hand flat against the desk.
He knew.
From the first day he saw me in that hallway, he knew.
He had watched me visit my mother — the woman who raised me — and he had seen his own daughter walking toward him.
Not a stranger who reminded him of someone.
His actual daughter.
The one he had given up.
The one he had spent thirty-one years wondering about.
And he hadn't said a word.
He had asked me to pretend to be his daughter.
Because he couldn't bring himself to tell me I already was.
I was still sitting there when my phone rang again.
This time it was the nurse.
"Sarah," she said, "I think you should know — Diane just came back to the hospital.
She's asking for copies of everything.
The will, the witness records, all of it." A pause.
May you like
"She brought a man with her.
He introduced himself as her attorney."
