what else to do.
This is Hope. She’s Jennifer’s daughter. She’s mine too.
Jen always said that if anything ever happened to her, Hope should be with you. She kept this jacket all these years. She said it was the last piece of home she never gave up.
I’m sorry.
There are things you don’t know. Things Paul kept from you.
I’ll come back and explain everything.
Please take care of Hope.
— Andy
My hands started shaking so badly the paper rattled.
“No,” I whispered, to no one, to the kitchen, to the ghost of my sixteen-year-old daughter. “No, Jen. No.”
For five years I had let go of the hope that my daughter would ever walk back through that door. Now Hope was blinking up at me from my kitchen table, and I understood, in one nauseating instant, that the two things could not both be true — that she
was gone, and that she had loved someone enough to build an entire secret life, a baby, a jacket kept like a relic, all without me knowing a single piece of it.
I pressed the note to my lips, closed my eyes for exactly as long as I could afford to, and then made myself move.
I called the pediatric clinic first and told them I was bringing in a baby who’d been left in my care.
Then I called Paul.
He picked up on the fourth ring. “What now, Jodi?”
“Get over here.”
“Jodi, I have work. I have a life.”
“And I have your granddaughter sitting on my kitchen table.”
Silence. Then, quieter: “What?”
“Come now, Paul.”
For illustrative purposes only
PART 3 — What Paul Knew
He showed up twenty minutes later, jaw already set for an argument. Amber stayed in the car, which told me she at
