nurse laid Toby against my chest for the first time, his tiny fist caught the fabric of my hospital gown exactly the way another set of fingers once had.
“He already knows his mom,” Wesley whispered, watching us.
I stared down at that small fist and remembered unwinding a different one, finger by finger, in a different hospital room half a lifetime earlier.
“Renee? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Just tired.”
There were chances, before the wedding, during my pregnancy with Toby, on quiet nights after he’d fallen asleep upstairs, when I almost told Wesley everything. Every time, I imagined him asking why I’d waited so long to say it, and I couldn’t bear to answer that question, so I waited longer instead.
My father told the first lie. But every night I watched my husband tuck Toby in and said nothing at all about the son who came before him, I
chose to keep that lie alive myself.
***
Then my father’s fall sent me back into his house to collect some of his things for the rehab facility, and I found something I was never supposed to see.
In his desk drawer, underneath old insurance paperwork, sat a shoebox holding two separate bundles of letters.
One bundle had my name across yellowing envelopes. Wesley’s handwriting.
I opened the first one.
“Your dad said you don’t want to hear from me anymore. I want to hear that from you myself. I thought we were happy together.”
Another, dated three weeks later. Another, two months after that.
“Whatever’s happening, please let me come see you. You don’t have to take me back. I just need to know you’re safe.”
I sat on my father’s bedroom floor reading every single one. Not one of them mentioned a baby.
The next morning, I set the
