Chapter 8
He thought there was no baby.
For five years, I had believed Jesse abandoned us, that he ran when it got real. And the whole time, the truth was sitting in a shoe box among my father’s things.
Jesse hadn’t run from his son.
He had been told his son didn’t exist.
He had written letter after letter to a woman he was told wanted nothing to do with him, and every one of them had been intercepted, marked, returned, and buried.
He had sent money for a baby he’d been told was never born.
I opened one of the letters, my hands shaking so hard the paper rattled.
It was short. He wasn’t a writer, and you could feel him struggling to say the thing. He wrote that he didn’t understand what had happened. He wrote that if I didn’t want him, he would go, but he needed to hear it from me.
Near the end, he wrote a line I have never been able to forget.
Just tell me you’re okay, and I’ll be whatever you need.
I was five years too late reading it.
I sat on my aunt’s guest bed in that mothball-smelling room, surrounded by the wreckage of a lie I’d been living inside my whole adult life, and I cried in a way I hadn’t cried since the delivery room.
Dany’s most recent drawing was folded in my bag, the one where he’d drawn our little family.
Just him and me and the salon.
Because that was the whole world he knew.
May you like
His father had wanted him. His father had fought to reach him.
And someone I called my mother had stood between a man and his child on purpose for five years and slept fine.
