Chapter 6: The Meeting
I was discharged on a Thursday.
Ethan drove us home.
He carried the car seat.
He assembled the bassinet in the bedroom without being asked.
He made dinner and left it on the stove and slept on the couch without discussion.
We had agreed: Claire first.
Everything else after.
She came on a Sunday afternoon, ten days after the flowers.
I had told Ethan to be there.
I had also told him he would not speak first.
He had agreed to both conditions without argument, which told me more about where he was than anything he'd said in the hospital.
She knocked at two o'clock exactly.
She was tall.
Dark hair, cut short.
She had Ethan's jaw — I saw it immediately, the same angle, the same slight squareness — and she was looking at me with an expression I recognized because I'd worn it myself recently.
Trying to hold it together in front of a stranger.
"Claire," I said.
"Come in."
She stepped inside and her eyes went straight to Ethan.
He stood up from the couch.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Then she said, "You look older than the photos my mother kept."
"I am," he said.
His voice was rough.
"I'm sorry.
I'm sorry about your mother.
I'm sorry about — all of it."
"I didn't come here for an apology."
"I know.
But I'm giving you one anyway."
She looked at him for a long time.
Then she looked at me.
"You didn't have to do this," she said.
"Invite me here.
You didn't owe me anything."
"No," I agreed.
"But you sent those flowers because you needed someone to see you.
I'm seeing you."
Something shifted in her face.
Just slightly.
Just enough.
I brought out tea.
We sat at the kitchen table, the three of us, in the strange careful quiet of people who share something enormous and are only beginning to find the edges of it.
She talked about her mother.
About Portland.
About the years she'd spent wondering, and the moment Diane had finally told her the truth from a hospital bed, and the fourteen months since then that she'd spent deciding what to do with it.
Ethan listened.
He didn't interrupt.
He didn't defend himself.
At one point she said, "She never hated you.
That's what made it harder, I think.
She just said you weren't ready.
That you chose the easier thing."
Ethan's hands were flat on the table.
"She was right," he said.
Claire looked at him.
"I know."
Then, from the other room, the baby made a sound.
Claire's eyes moved toward the hallway.
"Her name is Nora," I said.
"Can I—" She stopped.
Started again.
"Is it all right if I see her?"
May you like
I stood up without hesitating.
"Come on," I said.
