My hands were steady.
I don’t know how.
“I have questions,” I said.
“And I want answers.
All of them.
Tonight.”
Dean nodded.
Ethan nodded.
I waited for the water to boil and tried to remember who I was before I walked through that restaurant door two nights ago.
I couldn’t quite find her.
The tea went cold before anyone drank it.
I asked Dean to start from the beginning.
Not from eight weeks ago.
From before we met.
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he told me.
Her name was Sandra.
They had met at a conference in the spring of 1998.
He was twenty-eight.
She was twenty-two.
It lasted six weeks.
He ended it because he said he knew, even then, that I was who he wanted.
He had come back to me and proposed three months later.
“You never mentioned her,” I said.
“It didn’t seem—”
“Don’t say it didn’t seem important.”
He closed his mouth.
“Did you love her?”
He looked at the table.
“I cared about her.
It wasn’t the same as what I felt for you.
But I cared about her.”
I looked at Ethan.
“And she never tried to contact him?
In twenty-five years?”
“She said she decided it was cleaner not to.” Ethan turned his mug in his hands.
He hadn’t drunk anything either.
“She was proud.
She didn’t want to be the woman who showed up with a baby and disrupted someone’s life.
She said she told herself she was protecting everyone.”
“And you?” I asked.
“Growing up — what did she tell you?”
“That my father didn’t know about me.
That it wasn’t his fault.” He paused.
“I believed her.
I just — when she got sick, I needed to know for myself.
I needed to see him.”
“Of course you did,” I said.
Dean looked at me when I said that.
I wasn’t saying it for him.
I was saying it because it was true.
“When she told you,” I said to Dean, “eight weeks ago — what was the first thing you did?”
“I drove to her house.”
“That same day?”
“Within an hour.”
“And Ethan was there?”
“No.
Not that first time.
It was just Sandra and me.” He exhaled slowly.
“She looked — she didn’t look well.
She was sitting up in a chair by the window.
She apologized.
I told her she didn’t need to.
We talked for a long time.”
“About what?”
“About him.” He glanced at Ethan.
“About what he was like.
What he’d studied.
Whether he was happy.” His voice dropped.
“She showed me photographs.”
Ethan was very still.
“She showed you photographs,” I repeated.
“Yes.”
“And you sat there looking at pictures of your son and you came home and you said nothing to me.”
“Carol—”
“For eight weeks.”
“I didn’t know how to tell you something like that.”
“You tell me.” My voice stayed level.
“You sit me down and you tell me.
That’s how.”
He didn’t argue.
There was nothing to argue.
I turned back to Ethan.
