The kitchen was full of afternoon light. The maple tree outside the window was just starting to turn, a few leaves at the very top gone orange.
Eli was still sitting across from me. His coffee had gone cold three times.
“I’m so sorry,” he said quietly. “I should never have read that first page.”
“No,” I said. “I’m glad you did.”
He looked at me.
“If you hadn’t,” I said, “you’d have kept the couch. And the package would have stayed inside it. And I’d never have known.”
I touched the stack of envelopes.
“You brought her back to me,” I said.
Eli looked down at the table.
“My grandmother died when I was ten,” he said. “My parents sold everything in her house at an estate sale. Two weeks after the funeral. I remember standing in her kitchen watching strangers carry out her rocking chair.”
He swallowed.
“Last night, when I found that package with your name on it,” he said, “all I could think was, somebody’s grandmother is going to lose something important. And nobody’s going to bring it back.”
“Do you want the couch back?” he asked. “I can bring it tonight. I’ll get my buddy.”
I thought about it.
I thought about Mila, bouncing on the sagging middle. Daddy, we both fit. About Eli and his daughter watching cartoons on the floor of an empty apartment, every other weekend.
About Arthur patting the cushion beside him. This one makes you sit closer to me.
“No,” I said. “Keep it.”
Eli started to protest.
“It was always meant to make people sit closer,” I said. “Arthur said so for twenty years. You and Mila need that more than I do right now.”
I smiled at him.
“Just sew the bottom back up,” I said. “And maybe leave a little room.”
Eli laughed. It was the first time I’d seen him laugh all day.
He picked up the forty dollars from where he’d set it on the table. He tried to give it back to me.
I pushed it back across.
“Buy Mila some crayons,” I said. “So she has something to drop between the cushions.”
Part Twelve: The Phone Call
I didn’t call Daniel that night.
I sat at the kitchen table until long after dark, with the letters spread out around me. I read them again. And again. I looked at every photograph.
A baby with four teeth and cake on his face. A boy with a toy fire engine. A teenager in a baseball uniform. A man in scrubs. A little girl named Rose.
At midnight, I went to bed. I didn’t sleep.
I didn’t call the next day either.
I was angry. I’ll be honest about that. I was angrier than I’d ever been in my life.
Arthur had lied to me. For forty years. He’d made a decision about our daughter’s body without me. And then he’d looked me in the eye in that hospital bed and promised me something that wasn’t true.
He’d met this man. Sat across from him at a diner. Shown him the only picture we had of Rose. And come home and done the crossword puzzle like nothing had happened.
I called Kate on the third day.
I told her everything. It took an hour. She didn’t interrupt once.
When I finished, she was quiet for a long time.
“Mom,” she said finally. “I’m a pediatric nurse.”
“I know, honey.”
“I work in the NICU,” she said. “I’ve seen parents make that choice. I’ve been in the room.”
