“Who is she?” I asked.
Grandma swallowed hard. “My sister. Margaret.”
I had heard the name exactly twice in my life, always in passing, always followed by silence. All I’d ever known was that Margaret had died young.
Grandma turned the photograph over. A date was written on the back in faded pencil, and beneath it, two words: Baby Rose.
My mother leaned in over my shoulder. “Mom — who was Rose?”
Grandma’s eyes filled again. “My niece.”
That was when Dean moved for the first time.
“Enough,” he said, and took a step toward the door.
Bryce shifted his weight and planted himself between Dean and the deadbolt without seeming to decide to do it.
“Get out of my way,” Dean said.
“No.”
I looked at Grandma. “Why is he trying to leave?”
She opened the leather journal in her lap. “Because he knows.”
Trina turned to her husband, her voice thin. “Knows what, Dean?”
Grandma drew a slow, unsteady breath. “Margaret had a daughter when she was seventeen.”
Nobody spoke. Somewhere behind us, the abandoned birthday cake sat with its single candle burned down to a stub.
“Her parents were ashamed,” Grandma went on. “Our parents. They sent her away before anyone in town could know she was pregnant.”
My mother’s voice came out barely above a whisper. “Our grandparents did that?”
Grandma nodded, and her hand drifted to the folded baby blanket resting in the suitcase like it was still warm. “Rose was born in secret. Margaret wanted to keep her. They wouldn’t allow it.”
My chest went tight. “What happened to the baby?”
“She was given to another family.” Grandma’s eyes met mine, steady now despite the tears. “A closed adoption. The kind nobody was supposed to be able to undo.”
I glanced down at Sophie’s bare heel, at the small brown mark above it, and something in my body understood before my mind did.
“I still don’t understand,” I said anyway.
Grandma reached for a second photograph, older and more faded than the first. It showed an infant alone, wrapped in what I now recognized as the same yellowed blanket sitting in the suitcase. The baby’s left foot was turned toward the camera.
Above the heel was the same irregular brown mark.
I stopped breathing.
Bryce whispered, “Oh my God,” and my mother sank into the nearest chair as if her legs had simply stopped being willing to hold her.
I looked at Sophie. Then at the photograph. Then back at my grandmother.
“Birthmarks repeat in families sometimes,” I said, grasping for the ordinary explanation even as it slipped through my fingers.
“Sometimes,” Grandma agreed, her voice breaking on the word. “But this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it since Rose.”
She turned, slowly, to look directly at Dean.
His expression changed. Not much. Just enough that I finally understood why he’d been trying so hard to leave.
PART 6
“What did you do?” I asked him.
Dean shook his head. “Don’t start.”
“Tell her,” Grandma said, her voice rising for the first time all day.
Dean stared at the floor like it owed him an answer. “Tell me what?” I said, and my own heartbeat had gotten loud enough that I could feel it in my ears.
Grandma reached back into the suitcase and pulled out an envelope, its edges gone soft and gray with age.
“I found this after your grandfather died,” she said, handing it to me.
Inside was a letter, the paper so fragile I was almost afraid to unfold it all the way. I read only a few lines before my hands started shaking on their own.
Margaret had spent years searching for the daughter she’d been forced to give up. And eventually, she had found her.
Rose had grown up. Rose had married. Rose had a daughter of her own.
My mother leaned over my shoulder to read, and then covered her mouth with both hands.
Near the bottom of the letter, in Margaret’s careful, slanted handwriting, was a name I knew better than my own.
It was my mother’s name.
I looked up at her. She looked at Grandma.
“No,” my mother said, in the voice of someone hoping a single word could undo a sentence she’d already read.
Grandma nodded slowly. “Yes.”
