Chapter 4: The Daughter I Never Knew Existed
I didn't sleep.
I lay on top of the covers in my own room with the letter on the nightstand and the ceiling fan turning slow circles above me, and I thought about forty-three years of a man I thought I knew down to the grain of him.
By five in the morning I gave up and made coffee.
Henry knocked at seven.
I opened the door.
He was holding two cups from the place on the corner, and he looked like he hadn't slept either.
"I wasn't sure you'd open it," he said.
"I almost didn't."
He handed me the cup and I stepped back to let him in.
We sat at the small table by the window.
The ocean was pale and flat in the early light.
A pelican moved along the waterline without hurrying.
"Tell me about her," I said.
"Diane.
What did Matt tell you?"
"Not much.
He was protective of her privacy, even with me." Henry wrapped both hands around his cup.
"He said she was a good person.
That she'd had a hard life — her mother passed when she was in her thirties.
She never married.
She works as a nurse."
I thought about that.
A nurse.
Alone.
Her mother gone.
"Does she know about me?" I asked.
"About his family?"
"He told her he had a wife and children.
He was honest about that, at least." Henry paused.
"She didn't ask him to leave you.
She didn't ask him for anything.
She just wanted to know who he was."
Something shifted in my chest.
Not softened.
Just shifted.
"And she wants to meet me," I said.
"That's what he wrote."
"Why?
What could she possibly want from me?"
Henry set his cup down.
"I think she wants to know the rest of him.
The part she never got."
I looked out at the water.
"I'm angry," I said.
"I want you to know that.
I'm not sitting here being graceful about this.
I am furious at him."
"I know."
"He lied to me for forty-three years."
"He did."
"And then he arranged all of this — you, this trip, this letter — like he could just organize his way out of what he did."
"He couldn't," Henry said simply.
"He knew that.
That's why he was afraid."
I pressed my fingers against my eyes.
"Why didn't he just tell me?
When he found her.
When he was still here.
We could have — I don't know.
We could have talked about it."
"He was a proud man," Henry said.
"And proud men are sometimes cowards about the things that matter most."
That landed somewhere true and painful.
"You knew him well," I said.
"Well enough to know he loved you.
And well enough to know that love doesn't cancel out what he did."
I picked up the letter again.
Diane's phone number was written in Matt's hand at the bottom of the second page.
Below it, her address in Beaufort.
"If I call her," I said slowly, "I can't take it back."
"No."
"And if I don't call her, she spends the rest of her life wondering why his wife never reached out."
"Yes."
I folded the letter carefully and set it back in the envelope.
"I need a few days," I said.
"You have time.
Your flight isn't until tomorrow."
"I'm going to change my flight."
Henry looked at me.
"I'm not ready to go home," I said.
"I'm not ready to walk back into that house and sit with this alone." I met his eyes.
"Would you stay?
A few more days.
I'm not asking for anything except — I don't want to think about this by myself."
Henry didn't hesitate.
"I'll call the front desk after breakfast."
I nodded.
I looked down at the envelope in my hands.
Somewhere forty minutes south of us, a woman named Diane had her father's eyes and had spent her whole life on the outside of a family she never knew she had.
And I was the only person left who could decide what happened next.
My phone buzzed on the table.
I glanced at the screen.
It was a text from my youngest daughter, Carol.
*Mom, whose number is this?
May you like
Someone just called me saying they're trying to reach you.
They said it was about Dad.*
