Chapter 5: What Diane Had Been Keeping
I found Diane in the family waiting room at the end of the corridor.
She was sitting with a paper cup of coffee she hadn't touched, staring at a television mounted high on the wall with the sound off.
When I came in she looked up and read my face immediately.
"He told you about the photograph," she said.
"He told me he didn't circle it." I sat down across from her.
"So I'm asking you."
She set the cup down on the table beside her.
"My mother," she said.
I waited.
"They were married for twenty-two years.
My mother and my father." She said it without looking at me.
"She knew about you before I did.
She found the photograph in his desk — the one of the two of you from the night you met.
He'd kept it the whole time.
Through the marriage, through everything." Her voice was even and careful.
"She circled your face.
I don't know exactly when.
I found it after she passed, three years ago, when I was clearing her things.
It had been in her bedside drawer."
Something settled over me that was not quite guilt and not quite sorrow but something that lived between them.
"She knew he never stopped," I said.
"She knew." Diane finally looked at me.
"She didn't hate you.
I want to be clear about that.
She told me once — I was maybe thirty — she said, 'Your father loves me.
But there is a part of him that belongs somewhere else and I made my peace with that a long time ago.' I didn't understand what she meant then."
"And the photograph ended up back in his house."
"I put it there.
After she died.
I thought he should have it." She paused.
"I didn't think about the circle.
I should have removed it.
I'm sorry you saw it that way."
"I thought it was a warning," I said.
"Or a threat."
"It was grief," Diane said.
"Just grief, written in red ink."
We sat with that for a moment.
"What was her name?" I said.
"Patricia." A small, private smile crossed Diane's face.
"She was a difficult woman.
Funny and difficult and very loving in her own way.
She deserved better than a husband whose heart was only ever half there."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"I know that probably sounds strange coming from me."
"It doesn't." Diane picked up her coffee, looked at it, set it back down.
"She knew what she was choosing.
She chose it anyway.
That was her decision to make."
I thought about Patricia.
A woman I had never met, who had spent twenty-two years married to a man who kept a photograph of someone else in his desk.
Who had circled a stranger's face in red ink and then kept the photograph in her bedside drawer until she died.
Not out of malice.
Out of something more complicated and more human than malice.
"He said there was something else," I said.
"Something you needed to explain.
He said it like there was more."
Diane's expression shifted.
"Yes," she said.
"There is."
She reached into her bag and took out her phone.
She opened something and turned the screen toward me.
It was an email.
Sent to Thomas six weeks ago, from an address I didn't recognize.
The subject line read: *She needs to know the truth about what her father did.*
I looked up at Diane.
"Someone else knows," I said.
May you like
"Someone else has known for a long time," she said.
"And they've been waiting for the right moment to use it."
