She was crying now. I could hear it.
“Mom, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever watched anyone do,” she said. “Standing in a hallway with a doctor, an hour to decide, while your baby is dying in the next room.”
She took a breath.
“Dad was alone,” she said. “You were unconscious. He couldn’t ask you. He had to decide by himself. On the worst morning of his life.”
“He lied to me,” I said.
“I know,” Kate said. “And he was wrong to lie. But Mom, think about what you asked him. You asked him for a promise he’d already broken. While you were lying in a hospital bed looking like you’d shatter.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“What would you have done?” she asked. “If you’d been him? Standing next to that bed?”
I didn’t answer.
I didn’t have to. I knew.
I would have lied too.
On the fourth day, I called the number on the last envelope.
It rang three times. Then a man’s voice answered. Warm. Careful.
“Hello?”
I couldn’t speak. I just held the phone.
“Hello?” he said again. “Is somebody there?”
“Is this Daniel?” I finally said. “Daniel Hartwell?”
“Yes,” he said. “Who’s calling?”
I took a breath.
“My name is Fran Delaney,” I said. “I’m Rose’s mother.”
The line went completely silent.
For a long moment, I thought the call had dropped.
Then I heard something. A sound like a man trying not to cry and failing.
“Mrs. Delaney,” Daniel said. His voice broke on my name. “I’ve been waiting forty years to hear you say that.”
Part Thirteen: The Waffle House
We met the next Saturday at the Waffle House on Broad Street.
It was Arthur’s Waffle House. The one he went to every Saturday morning for twenty-two years with his crossword puzzle and his black coffee. The waitress, a woman named Darlene who’d worked there since 1998, saw me walk in and came around the counter to hug me.
“I’ve been missing your Arthur,” she said. “He always sat right there. Booth by the window.”
“I know,” I said.
Daniel was already sitting in that booth.
I recognized him from the photographs. He was forty now. Tall, with blond hair going a little gray at the temples. He wore a blue button-down shirt and had a pair of reading glasses tucked in his front pocket.
Beside him sat a little girl.
She was nine, with long blonde hair in a braid and a gap where her front tooth had fallen out. She was coloring on the back of a paper placemat with crayons the restaurant had given her.
When she saw me, she put down her crayon.
Daniel stood up when I reached the booth.
He didn’t say anything at first. He just looked at me. His eyes filled with tears.
“Mrs. Delaney,” he said.
“Fran,” I said. “Please.”
He held out his hand. Then he seemed to change his mind. He opened his arms instead.
I walked into them.
He was very tall, and I’m very short, and my face came up to the middle of his chest. I could hear his heart beating through his shirt. Steady and strong.
I stood there and listened to it for a long time.
“Arthur told me you were a second-grade teacher,” Daniel said when we finally sat down. “He said you were the best one in Fairborn.”
“He said that?”
“He talked about you the whole time,” Daniel said. “Every time we met. Four times. He’d ask me questions about my work, and then he’d find a way to tell me something about you.”
