Chapter 3: The Woman in the Photo
I turned the phone so he could see the screen.
He didn't move.
He didn't speak.
He just looked at it the way a man looks at something he has spent years hoping would never surface.
"That's her," I said.
"Isn't it.
That's Diane."
He closed his eyes.
"Yes."
"And the baby she's holding." My voice was steadier than I felt.
"Whose baby is that?"
The monitor beside my daughter beeped softly.
A nurse's footsteps passed in the hallway outside.
The whole world kept moving, completely indifferent to the fact that mine had just stopped.
"Ethan." I said his name like a warning.
"Whose baby."
"Mine." The word came out barely above a whisper.
"She was mine."
The air left my lungs.
"She."
He nodded once.
I set the phone face-down on the blanket.
I needed my hands to be empty.
I needed to not be holding anything breakable.
"You had a daughter," I said.
"Before me.
With a woman named Diane.
And you never told me."
"I was going to—"
"When?" My voice cracked on the word.
"When were you going to tell me, Ethan?
Before our wedding?
Before I got pregnant?
Before I spent twenty-three hours bringing your child into the world?"
He stood up.
I held one hand out flat.
"Don't."
He stopped.
"Where is she?" I asked.
"The baby in that photo.
Where is she now?"
He sat back down.
His hands pressed flat against his knees, like he needed something solid to hold onto.
"I don't know," he said.
"You don't know."
"Diane and I — it ended badly.
She left.
She took the baby and she left, and I never heard from her again.
I tried to find them.
For two years I tried.
And then I stopped, because I thought—" He stopped himself.
"Because you thought what?"
"Because I thought it was better to let it go."
I stared at him.
The man I had married in a garden on a Saturday in June.
The man who had cried when the doctor first told us we were pregnant.
The man who had taken forty-seven photos of our daughter in the last eighteen hours.
"You had a child," I said quietly, "and you let it go."
He flinched like I'd sl@pped him.
"It wasn't that simple."
"Then explain it to me.
Because from where I'm sitting, it looks exactly that simple."
He opened his mouth.
Closed it.
My phone buzzed a third time.
Same unknown number.
This message was longer.
*"His daughter didn't disappear.
She grew up.
And she has been looking for him for three years.
My name is Claire.
Diane was my mother.
She d*ed fourteen months ago.
And before she d*ed, she told me everything."*
I read it twice.
Then I looked up at Ethan.
"Her name is Claire," I said.
"And her mother is gone."
His face collapsed.
And for the first time since the flowers arrived, I didn't feel afraid.
I felt something colder than fear.
Because whoever had sent those flowers, whoever had tucked that charm beneath the black ribbon and paid a courier in cash — she hadn't done it to hurt me.
May you like
She had done it to find him.
And she had been waiting a very long time.
