him again.
Then, eleven years after my father sent me away, someone called my name across a grocery store parking lot, and I turned toward the one person I’d spent over a decade trying to stop thinking about.
Wesley, Toby’s biological father, stood beside a shopping cart, smiling like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to.
I checked his left hand before I said anything. He noticed me checking.
“No wife,” he said. “You?”
“No husband.”
He held out half of a granola bar from his cart, the same easy gesture from all those years ago behind the hardware store register.
“You remember,” I said.
“Of course I remember, Renee.”
We talked in that parking lot until the store started dimming its lights for closing.
Coffee turned into dinner the following week. Over dessert, he reached across the table and took my hand.
“I should have fought harder for us.
I should have shown up at your house, called every day, something.”
My father had told me Wesley knew about the pregnancy and simply hadn’t cared. So when I heard a man apologizing for losing touch with the girl he loved, I mistook it for a man apologizing for abandoning our son. Neither of us said quite enough that night to discover the difference.
“I can’t relive those months,” I whispered. “Any of it.”
“We don’t have to relive anything. We can just start now.”
He held my hand across the table. “I’d like that, if you would.”
We’d been fifteen and sixteen, I reminded myself. Both terrified, both cornered by adults who’d made the decisions for us. I told myself I could forgive the boy he’d been without ever explaining to the man he’d become what had actually happened to our son.
We married two years later. When the
