“I’ll give you ten minutes.”
He walked away before I could argue.
Nathan was still standing where I’d last seen him.
He hadn’t moved.
His hands were at his sides.
His jacket was slightly wrinkled, like he’d been sitting in it for hours before I arrived.
I walked toward him.
He watched every step.
When I stopped in front of him, neither of us spoke for a moment.
“Your lawyer told you,” he said finally.
“He told me enough.”
Nathan nodded slowly.
He looked down at the floor, then back up at me.
“Her name is Claire.
She’s thirty-one.
She was adopted by a family in Ohio when she was four, and she spent the last three years trying to find where she came from.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
“Because I found out the same week you lost the baby.”
The hallway went quiet around me.
Two years ago.
The pregnancy we had tried for.
The one that ended at eleven weeks, quietly, in a hospital room with pale green walls.
I had spent six months after that barely getting out of bed.
Nathan had been there every morning.
Every night.
“I didn’t want to add anything to what you were already carrying,” he said.
