Vanessa’s father had likely known about me before my father’s investigator made his first phone call. Men with resources that significant do not remain uninformed about the people in their children’s lives.
What he had been waiting for, perhaps, was the right moment.
The morning after a married man’s pregnant wife was left on the side of a road was apparently that moment.
My father set his phone down. “You don’t need to think about any of this today.”
“I’m already thinking about it.”
“Claire.”
“I’m eight months pregnant, not unconscious,” I said.
He almost smiled.
Megan reached over and took my hand. She didn’t say anything. She had been doing that since we were children, showing up and staying present without needing to fill the silence with words. It was one of the things I had always counted on without naming it.
I looked at the photograph again.
The little boy’s dimple.
Eric’s eyes in a child’s face.
I wondered if that boy knew his father. If he believed Eric was fully present in his life or if he, too, was accustomed to absences and excuses. I wondered if Vanessa had believed the same things I believed, that the distance was temporary, that the unexplained gaps were ordinary stress, that the version of Eric she was given was the real one.
I wondered if she knew he had left me on a road the previous morning.
Megan, watching my face, said quietly, “You don’t have to figure out what you feel about her.”
“I know.”
“She may have been used too.”
“I know that too.”
Neither thing made the photograph easier to look at. But both things were true, and I had spent enough years pretending things weren’t true to last a lifetime.
A nurse came in to check my monitors and adjust something on the IV line. She moved efficiently and without fuss, the practiced calm of someone accustomed to rooms where difficult things had recently happened.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Steadier than yesterday,” I said.
