Chapter 5: The Man Three Months Away
I didn't sleep.
I sat in the kitchen after Ryan left, after Iris went upstairs without another word to me, and I sat with the lights on and both hands wrapped around a mug of tea that went cold before I took a single sip.
Daniel was here.
In this city.
Three months.
That meant he had arrived in February.
February, when Iris was in the middle of her college applications, when I was working double shifts to cover the application fees, when everything felt fragile and hopeful at the same time.
He had been somewhere in this city for all of that and I hadn't known.
Or I hadn't looked.
I heard Iris's bedroom door open at half past one.
Her footsteps on the stairs.
She appeared in the kitchen doorway in her prom dress still, the corsage wilting on her wrist, and for one second she looked so young that my chest ached with it.
She sat down across from me.
Neither of us spoke for a moment.
"I'm not angry at you," she said finally.
"You have every right to be."
"I know." She pulled the corsage off her wrist and set it on the table.
"I'm not, though.
Not yet.
I think I'm too — I don't know what I am."
"Shocked," I said.
"Maybe." She looked at the corsage.
"Did he hurt you badly?
When you were together?"
I had thought about how to answer this question for seventeen years.
Every version I had rehearsed was either too much or not enough.
"Yes," I said.
"Not in ways that left marks.
But yes."
She nodded slowly.
"And you were already pregnant when you left."
"I found out two weeks after."
"And you decided not to tell him."
"I decided to protect you."
"By taking away my choice."
That one sat between us for a long time.
"Yes," I said.
"By taking away your choice.
You were fourteen months old, Iris.
You didn't have a choice yet.
I made one for you.
And I have spent every year since then hoping I made the right one, and some years I was sure I did, and other years —" My voice broke again.
I let it.
"Other years I wasn't sure at all."
Iris reached across the table and put her hand over mine.
She didn't say it was okay.
She didn't say she forgave me.
She just put her hand there, and that was more than I deserved.
"I'm going to find him," she said.
"I need you to understand that."
"I know."
"And I need you to not try to stop me."
"I won't."
She looked up.
"Promise me."
"I promise."
She studied my face for a moment, checking whether I meant it.
Then she nodded and sat back.
"Ryan's dad," she said.
"His name is Tom.
Tom Greer.
He and Daniel grew up on the same street in Millhaven.
Did you know Tom?"
"I knew of him.
We never really spoke."
"He wants to meet with us.
Both of us.
He says he can explain things that Daniel asked him to explain, if Daniel ever — if we were ever found."
I felt the cold mug under my palms.
"Daniel asked him to do that."
"Apparently he left Tom a kind of — Ryan called it a letter.
More like a statement.
In case."
"In case of what?"
Iris looked at me steadily.
"In case he didn't get the chance to say it himself."
The kitchen felt very small suddenly.
"When?" I asked.
"Tomorrow morning," she said.
"If you'll come."
I looked at my daughter in her prom dress at two in the morning, asking me to walk into the thing I had spent sixteen years running from.
"Yes," I said.
"I'll come."
She stood up.
Paused at the doorway.
"Mom.
Whatever he did to you — I'm not forgetting that.
I just need to know who he is.
That's all."
May you like
She went back upstairs.
I sat with the cold tea until the sky outside the kitchen window started going gray.
