Chapter 3: What the Phone Already Knew
"Who is it?"
Claire didn't answer.
She was staring at the screen like it had said something impossible.
"Claire." I crossed the room in three steps.
"Who is calling you right now?"
She turned the phone face-down against her thigh.
"It's nobody."
"You just went white."
"Ethan, please—"
"Show me the screen."
She didn't move.
I looked at her — the dress I had saved three weeks to buy, the tears still sitting at the edges of her eyes, the photograph still in my hand — and something shifted inside me.
Not anger.
Something colder.
"I'm going to ask you one more time," I said.
"Who gave you that photograph?"
The phone stopped buzzing.
The room went very quiet.
Claire sat down on the edge of the bed.
She set the phone beside her, screen still down.
She pressed both hands flat against her knees, and for a moment she looked less like the woman I had spent six months falling for and more like someone bracing for impact.
"Her name is Ruth," she said.
I didn't recognize the name.
"Who is Ruth?"
"She was a nurse." Claire looked up.
"She worked at St.
Agatha's Hospital.
In the maternity ward."
My mouth went dry.
St.
Agatha's was the hospital where I had been born.
I knew that much from the single document my adoptive parents had ever shown me — a discharge summary with a date and a ward name and nothing else.
"How do you know someone from St.
Agatha's?"
"She found me first," Claire said.
"About eight months before you and I matched on Tinder."
Eight months.
I did the math without meaning to.
She had known about me before we ever spoke.
Before I had ever seen her profile.
Before I had almost deleted the app and then decided not to.
"She found you," I repeated.
"And she gave you a photograph of me as a child.
And then you joined Tinder."
Claire flinched.
"It wasn't like that."
"Then tell me what it was like."
She stood up.
She walked to the window and stood with her back to me, arms crossed over the emerald-green dress, and I watched her shoulders rise and fall with one slow breath.
"Ruth told me there was a young man," Claire said.
"She said he didn't know the truth about where he came from.
She said he was running out of time to find out."
"Running out of time because of what?"
Claire turned around.
Her face had changed again — not fear now, something closer to grief.
"Because Ruth is dying, Ethan.
She has been for the past year.
And she is the only person left alive who knows what really happened the night you were born."
The photograph felt heavier in my hand.
"What happened the night I was born?"
"I don't know all of it," Claire said.
"Ruth only told me pieces.
She said she couldn't tell me everything until she was certain you were ready to hear it."
"Ready." The word came out flat.
"I'm twenty-five.
I've spent my whole life not knowing where I came from.
And a dying woman decided I wasn't ready."
"She was protecting you."
"From what?"
Claire opened her mouth.
Her phone buzzed again — one single vibration this time.
A message, not a call.
She looked at it.
Whatever she read made her close her eyes.
"What does it say?" I asked.
She held the phone out to me without a word.
The message was from a number saved only as R.
*He needs to come now.
Tonight.
I don't have much longer.
May you like
Please, Claire.
Bring him.*
