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.
