My voice tightened.
“Not just the baby.”
“Me.”
Dad looked at me for a long time.
“It took me sixteen years to learn how to ask.”
He looked down at Wren.
“I’m glad I finally got it right once.”
My hospital bracelet now sits in a drawer in Wren’s room at my father’s house.
Beside the yellow blanket.
Beside the old brass key.
Simone’s room.
Dad gave it back to me.
“It’s always your room,” he said. “Use it whenever you want. Or don’t. Your choice.”
Wren and I visit on Tuesdays.
We sit in the window seat and look over my mother’s rose garden.
Dad takes care of it now.
He even bought a straw hat like hers.
Sometimes he kneels in the soil while the gardeners watch him, just as embarrassed as they once were watching Mom.
Last Tuesday, he cut a white rose and placed it in the nursery.
“Your mother would have loved her,” he said.
“I know.”
“She would have been at the hospital at three in the morning.”
He smiled faintly.
“Probably wearing pearls, just like Beverly.”
Then he paused.
“But she would have handed the baby back to you.”
