He sat slowly.
Then he looked at Vanessa.
“The photograph isn’t
what Claire thinks.”
Vanessa’s eyebrows rose.
“I’m more interested in what I think.”
Tyler said nothing.
She leaned toward him.
“You told me I had twins.”
My heart stopped.
Mason’s fingers tightened around mine.
Vanessa continued.
“You told me there were complications. You told me one baby survived and one didn’t.”
Tyler closed his eyes.
“You were barely conscious.”
“So?”
“You were sick.”
“So?”
“You had lost a lot of blood. The doctors—”
“Tyler.”
Her voice broke on his name.
For all my anger toward her, something inside me shifted.
This woman had accepted my husband’s proposal less than an hour ago.
She had thought she was entering the happiest day of her life.
Now she was sitting across from his wife and son, discovering that the story of her own child’s birth might have been built on a lie.
She wasn’t my enemy.
Not in that room.
Tyler was.
Vanessa pointed at the photograph.
“My sister took this.”
Tyler’s face changed.
A tiny change.
But I saw it.
Vanessa saw it too.
“My sister,” she repeated. “Natalie was there that morning. She sent me this picture years later after she found an old phone in storage.”
“Vanessa—”
“You told me the second baby died before I woke up.”
“I know.”
“And you told me there had been no photographs.”
“I know.”
“So why are there two living babies in this picture?”
Tyler leaned back.
His chair creaked beneath him.
He stared at the tabletop for so long that I could hear the fluorescent light buzzing above us.
Finally, he said, “Because the baby didn’t die.”
Mason inhaled sharply.
I felt something inside me become completely still.
Vanessa whispered, “What?”
Tyler looked at me.
“Claire, Mason is your son.”
It was an absurd sentence.
Of course he was my son.
I had carried him.
I had spent seventeen hours in labor.
I had counted every finger and toe.
I had watched his face scrunch when the nurse placed him against my chest.
