It was in a shoebox on the top shelf of my closet, with the adoption papers and her hospital bracelet and a lock of hair from her first haircut. I had never hidden it. I had put it up there for the day she asked.
She had asked, in the end, without asking.
“Mommy,” she had said, on Sunday, in the car, looking out of the window at nothing. “Did my first mommy have a picture?”
I said she did. I said I would show her one day when she was older.
“I think I’m older,” said Wynne.
So on Monday morning, when I was in the shower, my seven-year-old pulled the desk chair across my bedroom, climbed on it, took down the shoebox, and removed a single piece of paper, and folded it into her backpack.
“You should’ve asked me,” I told her.
“You’d have said when you’re older,” said my daughter. “And then I’d have been older, and you’d still have said it.”
Chapter 3: What Her Father Said
The man in the driver’s seat did not get out of that car.
Mr. Amory said it plainly, and I was grateful, because Wynne had gone very still beside me. “There wasn’t anything anybody could do, Wynne. I want you to know that crew tried for forty minutes. They cut the roof. They cut the door. A very good paramedic, whose name I still know, held his hand the entire time. But he was hurt in a way that wasn’t fixable, and he knew it, and he was not afraid.”
