Chapter 5: Diane's Letter
Claire stood in Vera's doorway with her shoes in her hand.
She'd been crying.
Her hair was loose and her eyes were red and she looked at me the way you look at someone you love when you're not sure yet whether love is enough.
"I'm sorry I drove off," she said.
"Don't be."
She looked at Vera.
"I don't think we've met."
"We haven't," Vera said.
"I'm Ruth's sister-in-law.
I knew your mother."
Claire went very still.
"Come sit down," Vera said gently.
"There's coffee."
Claire sat across from me.
She looked at the two envelopes on the table.
"What is all this?"
"My father left a letter," I said.
"I already read it.
I want you to read it too, but first I need to tell you what's in it, because I don't want you to read it alone."
She looked at me.
"Okay," she said quietly.
I told her.
All of it.
My father's letter, the photograph, the pregnancy, Diane leaving town.
I kept my voice even.
I watched her face while I talked.
She didn't interrupt.
She sat with her hands flat on the table and listened the way people listen when they're trying to hold themselves together from the outside in.
When I finished, she said, "So he's my father."
"That's what he feared," I said.
"But there's more."
I nodded at Vera.
Vera slid the white envelope across the table.
"Your mother sent me this eight months ago," Vera said.
"She asked me to keep it until it was needed.
I think it's needed now."
Claire looked at the envelope for a long moment.
Then she picked it up and opened it.
There were two pages inside, handwritten in blue ink.
Claire's hands were steady as she unfolded them, steadier than mine had been.
She read slowly.
I watched her eyes move across the lines.
I watched her stop halfway down the first page and take a breath.
I watched her keep reading.
When she finished, she set the pages down carefully, the way you set down something fragile.
"She says she doesn't think he's my father," Claire said.
"Yes."
"She says by the time she found out she was pregnant, they'd been apart for six weeks."
"Yes."
"She says there was someone else." Claire looked up.
"A man named Robert Caulfield.
She says she was with him twice during those six weeks, and that she always believed he was more likely." She paused.
"She says she never told him either."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"She says she's sorry," Claire said.
Her voice was steady but her chin was moving.
"She says she was so angry at your father for leaving that she didn't want to give him the chance to come back.
She says she told herself she was protecting me." She stopped.
"She says she knows that's not the whole truth."
Vera reached across and put her hand over Claire's.
Claire looked down at it.
Then she looked at me.
"We don't know," she said.
"We still don't actually know."
"No," I said.
"We don't.
Not without a test."
She nodded slowly.
"Then we need a test."
"Yes."
She picked up the pages again and read the last paragraph a second time.
I didn't ask what it said.
She'd tell me when she was ready.
"She says she loved me," Claire said finally.
"She says every choice she made, right or wrong, she made because she was trying to keep me safe." She set the pages down again.
"I don't know if I believe that.
I don't know if it matters whether I believe it."
"It doesn't have to matter tonight," I said.
She looked at me across the table.
The overhead light was yellow and the coffee had gone cold and outside the wind chimes on Vera's porch were moving in the dark.
"I don't know how to feel about any of this," she said.
"Neither do I."
"Are you scared?"
"Yes."
"So am I."
She reached across the table and took my hand.
Vera stood up quietly and carried the mugs to the sink.
"There's a clinic in Lubbock," she said, her back to us.
"They do DNA testing.
Results in five business days." She turned off the faucet.
"I can drive you both, if you want.
First thing tomorrow."
Claire looked at me.
I looked at Claire.
"Okay," I said.
But when I picked up my phone to set an alarm for the morning, there was a new notification on the screen.
A voicemail.
From a number I didn't recognize, with a Lubbock area code.
I didn't recognize the number.
May you like
But the name attached to it, pulled from some old contact I barely remembered saving, made my stomach drop.
Robert Caulfield.
