Chapter 4: What Diane Left Behind
I didn't sleep that night.
Ethan sat in the chair beside my bed until sometime after two in the morning, and then I told him to go home.
He argued.
I told him again.
He went.
The nurse came in at three to check on the baby.
She found me sitting up, phone in my lap, staring at nothing.
"Can I get you anything?" she asked.
"No," I said.
"Thank you."
She dimmed the light on her way out and left me alone with my daughter and everything I now knew.
I typed one message to the unknown number and sent it before I could talk myself out of it.
*"I'm not your enemy.
I didn't know you existed until tonight.
If you want to talk, I'll listen."*
The reply came in four minutes.
*"I wasn't sure you'd respond."*
*"I almost didn't,"* I wrote back.
*"Why the flowers?
Why like that?"*
A long pause.
Then:
*"I wanted him to know I'd found him.
I wanted it to feel the way it felt when my mother told me he'd just walked away.
I'm sorry it frightened you.
That wasn't what I meant."*
I held the phone for a long moment.
*"How old are you?"* I asked.
*"Twenty-three."*
Twenty-three.
Ethan and I had been married for four years.
Which meant she had already been nineteen when we walked down that aisle.
Already a person.
Already out there somewhere, not knowing if her father was alive or d*ad or simply didn't care.
*"He didn't know your mother had passed,"* I typed.
*"He found out tonight."*
Another pause.
Longer this time.
*"Did he cry?"*
I thought about his face when I read him her message.
The way it had simply fallen apart, like something structural had given way beneath it.
*"Yes,"* I wrote.
*"Good,"* she replied.
Then, after a moment:
*"I don't want money.
I don't want anything from him.
I just needed him to know that she d*ed and that I existed and that I turned out fine without him.
I needed him to have to sit with that."*
I read that three times.
"She turned out fine," I said quietly, to no one.
To my daughter, maybe.
To the dark room.
Then I typed: *"Will you meet me?
Not him.
Me.
Just to talk."*
The pause this time was so long I thought she wasn't going to answer.
Then: *"Why?"*
*"Because you sent those flowers to my room,"* I wrote.
*"And I think you deserve to look me in the eye.
And I think I deserve the same."*
Another long silence.
*"Okay,"* she finally wrote.
*"When you're out of the hospital.
You tell me when."*
I set the phone down on the blanket.
My daughter made a small sound in her sleep.
One fist uncurled and then curled again.
She had no idea.
She was two days old and she had no idea that somewhere in this city, she had a half-sister who had grown up without a father and had spent years working up the courage to send funeral flowers to a maternity ward just to make herself known.
I reached into the bassinet and rested two fingers lightly against my daughter's hand.
She gripped them without waking.
May you like
I stayed like that until the room started to go gray with early light.
And I still had not decided what I was going to say to Ethan.
