Chapter 2: She's Saying Your Name
I sat down on a plastic chair in that corridor and James knelt in front of me, still in his coat, still with those red eyes.
"She didn't make it," he said.
"The mother.
She didn't make it."
I didn't understand.
I said, "James, whose baby is this?"
He looked at the floor for a moment.
Then he looked back at me.
"My sister's."
I hadn't spoken to his sister Carol in three years.
Neither had he.
There had been an argument — money, something old and ugly — and she had walked out of a Christmas dinner and that was that.
"I didn't know she was pregnant," he said.
"I swear to you I didn't know."
"Where is — who was the father?"
"Gone.
Carol never told anyone who he was."
I looked through the glass at the bassinet.
"She's got nobody," James said quietly.
"There's no one else."
He took both my hands.
"I know what the doctor told us.
I know what it means.
I'm not asking you to carry her."
He stopped.
His voice broke on the next sentence.
"I'm asking if we can bring her home."
I looked at my husband — this man who kept a box of newborn things for four years and never once explained why — and I realized he had known something I hadn't.
That's when a nurse stepped out of the room and said, "She's asking for someone.
She keeps saying a name."
James went still.
"What name?" I asked.
The nurse looked at me carefully.
"She's saying yours."
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What does that mean — and how does a newborn know her name?
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What James reveals next will leave you speechless.
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