Chapter 4: The Name She Never Said
I didn't sleep that night.
I sat at the kitchen table until the sky outside went from black to gray to the pale, uncertain color of early morning, and I read Thomas's letter four more times.
Each time, I stopped at the same line.
*She told me you were pregnant.
She told me you didn't know yet.*
My mother had known.
My mother had gone to Thomas behind my back, at twenty-two years old, while I was still in love with him and had no idea I was carrying his child.
She had made a decision that altered the entire shape of my life.
And then she had sent me to Vermont, and she had never said a single word.
She had been dead for nineteen years.
I had no way to ask her why.
Carol came downstairs at six in the morning and found me still at the table.
"Did you sleep at all?"
"No."
She put the kettle on without asking.
She set a cup in front of me and sat down.
"Are you going to call him?"
"I don't know."
"Mom—"
"I said I don't know, Carol." My voice came out sharper than I meant it to.
"I'm sorry.
I just — I need to think."
"Okay." She wrapped both hands around her own cup.
"Then think out loud.
I'm not going anywhere."
I looked at the photograph.
I had set it upright against the fruit bowl so I could see it while I sat.
"He's fifty-four years old," I said.
"He has a whole life.
A life I wasn't part of.
What if he doesn't actually want to meet me?
What if the investigator's information is out of date?
What if he's moved on from looking?"
"The letter said he's been looking for eleven years."
"People stop looking."
"Some do." Carol looked at the photograph.
"He has your mouth."
I didn't answer.
"He does, Mom.
Look at it."
"I know." I had been looking at nothing else for six hours.
"What if I call and he answers and he's angry?
He has every right to be angry.
I gave him up.
I didn't know I was doing it, but he doesn't know that.
All he knows is that he was given away."
"Then you tell him what you told me.
That you didn't know."
"And if he doesn't believe me?"
Carol set her cup down.
"Mom.
What's the alternative?
You don't call.
You spend whatever time you have left wondering.
He spends whatever time he has left wondering.
And this—" she touched the edge of the photograph "—stays a secret that two people carried to their graves.
Is that what you want?"
It wasn't.
I knew it wasn't.
I picked up the letter and found the name Thomas had written at the bottom.
The investigator.
A woman named Patricia Hale, with a phone number and an email address.
"I'll call her first," I said.
"Before I call him.
I want to know more before I — I need to know more."
"That's reasonable."
"I need to know if he's well.
If he's — I need to know something about who he is before I hear his voice."
Carol nodded.
I set the letter down and looked at my daughter.
Fifty-one years old.
Brown eyes, her father's nose, my stubbornness in the set of her jaw.
"You have a brother," I said.
She blinked.
Once.
Twice.
"Half-brother," she said carefully.
"Does that matter to you?"
She was quiet for a moment.
Then: "Ask me again after we find out if he's a decent person."
It surprised me enough that I almost smiled.
"Fair enough," I said.
I called Patricia Hale at nine o'clock that morning.
She answered on the second ring, as if she had been expecting me.
"Mrs.
Carter," she said.
"I wondered when you'd call."
"You know who I am?"
"Thomas told me you'd be calling.
Eventually." A pause.
"I'm sorry for your loss.
He was a good man, in the end.
He worked very hard to make things right."
"Can you tell me about Robert?"
"I can tell you what I know." Another pause, shorter.
"He's a good man too, Mrs.
Carter.
Married.
Two daughters.
He teaches high school history in Portland.
He coaches the cross-country team in the fall."
My throat tightened.
"Does he still want to find me?"
"He never stopped," Patricia said.
"Not once in eleven years."
I closed my eyes.
"Then I'd like his number," I said.
"When you think it's appropriate to give it."
"I think," Patricia said quietly, "that it's been appropriate for quite some time."
She gave me the number.
I wrote it on the back of the envelope that had held Thomas's letter, and I sat with it in my hand for a long time after we hung up.
Carol was watching from the doorway.
"Well?"
"He coaches cross-country," I said.
She stared at me.
"You ran cross-country.
In high school."
"I know."
The silence between us was the kind that doesn't need filling.
I looked at the number in my handwriting on the back of Thomas's envelope.
Then Carol's phone rang.
She glanced at the screen and her face changed.
"It's David," she said.
David was her brother.
My younger son.
"He must have heard something from the attorney's office.
About the estate."
She answered it.
I watched her listen.
I watched her expression go from neutral to careful to something harder.
She lowered the phone.
"Thomas left you something else," she said.
"Beyond the key and the box."
"What?"
May you like
"David says the attorney called him this morning.
He says Thomas's family is already contesting it."
