Chapter 5
A moment later, he returned with a small envelope.
He placed it between us on the table.
“You’ve had this for two weeks?”
“Yes.”
“Do you look at it?”
His face folded.
“Every night.”
While I had been upstairs trying to remember whether Claudia had made a sound, Robert had spent every night looking at something that belonged to her.
I opened the envelope.
Inside was a small card bearing two tiny footprints.
For a moment, I couldn’t process their size.
Tiny heels.
Tiny toes.
My daughter had been here.
Not merely as a thought.
Not only as a pregnancy.
Not as a tragedy people discussed in lowered voices.
Claudia had existed.
I touched one footprint with my fingertip.
“Hi, baby girl.”
My voice barely worked.
“You were here. You existed.”
Robert made a broken sound behind me.
I turned toward him.
“I understand why you held Ivy.”
I looked back at the footprints.
“And I understand why you held Claudia. I was in surgery.”
I swallowed.
“What I don’t know how to forgive yet is everything you chose after I woke up.”
Robert nodded through his tears.
“You need to sleep downstairs tonight.”
“I will.”
I looked at Claudia’s footprint card.
“And we need to talk to Willie.”
His face tightened.
“He thinks she’s alive.”
“I know.”
“No, Robert.”
I looked directly at him.
“He thinks Claire has her. He’s been saving money to bring his sister home.”
Robert covered his eyes.
“I should’ve noticed.”
“He thinks she’s alive.”
“So should I.”
That stopped him.
For two weeks, I had been buried so deeply in grief and trapped inside my recovering body that I hadn’t noticed what was happening to my son.
I sat across from Robert.
“I’m still angry.”
He looked at me.
“You made choices that belonged to both of us.”
“I know.”
“But Ivy wasn’t one of them.”
His eyes filled.
“I didn’t hold her because I wanted another baby.”
“I know that now.”
“I heard her cry and I…”
He pressed a hand to his chest.
“I needed to remember what life sounded like.”
That sentence broke something inside me.
Understanding why he did it didn’t make everything okay.
But I could finally see the grief behind it.
“We can’t keep guessing what the other person needs,” I said.
Robert nodded.
“We’re getting help.”
“Counseling?”
“Yes.”
May you like
I looked at him.
“We need help with this. Willie needs parents who are available to him, and we need to tell him the truth.”
