I gripped the phone.
“Whose?”
There was a knock at my hotel door.
Three slow knocks.
I froze.
Vanessa whispered my name through the phone.
Another knock.
Then a man’s voice came from the hallway.
“Claire?”
I knew that voice.
I hadn’t heard it in seven years.
But I knew it instantly.
My hand flew to my mouth.
On the phone, Vanessa whispered, “Claire, the name Natalie wrote is Daniel.”
Another knock sounded.
“Claire,” the man outside called again. “It’s me.”
Mason stirred in the other room.
I stared at the locked hotel door as the man I had spent seven years believing abandoned me spoke the next words.
“I know what Tyler told you.”
A pause.
Then:
“And I know where your real son is.”My husband left me alone at my boss’s Christmas dinner, then texted, “Work came up. Sorry, Issa.”
