“I thought you’d abandoned us.”
He glanced at Fabian.
“I’d already saved most of the deposit. Once I had enough for the room, I moved out and came back.”
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“You should have come to me.”
“I tried, then your parents told me you called our son a mistake.” His expression hardened.
“I moved out and came back.”
“They said you wanted to forget all of it. Me too,” he added.
“I never said that.”
“They showed me the papers! Your signature. They said I could take responsibility for him or the adoption would go ahead.”
“You knew what my parents were like,” I said. “Why would you believe them?”
“I never said that.”
Daniel opened his mouth, then closed it.
“I was too frightened to even tell them your name. You knew what we were planning. And you let them speak for me?”
“I thought you must have changed your mind. Your signature was there. I was scared they’d send him away before I could stop it.”
“You let them speak for me?”
“So you took him. I understand taking him. But after that?”
He looked at the floor. “I should have come back.”
“I was waiting for you. Even after they said he’d gone, I thought you might come and help me find him.”
He covered his mouth.
“I should have come back.”
I had spent too many years imagining that conversation to make it easier for him now.
“I believed you’d rejected us,” he said. “I was hurt, and raising him was hard. I let that become my reason not to ask again.”
“They threatened to make me homeless. After helping me prepare his clothes. After promising I could bring him home.” The tears came too fast to stop them. “They tricked me into trusting them.”
“I believed you’d rejected us.”
Daniel sat when his knees caught the chair.
“I wanted him,” I said. “I searched for him. Whatever you thought of me, you should have let me tell you that.”
Daniel looked at our son. “I hear you now.”
The signature I’d hated for 31 years had convinced him I’d chosen this.
“I hear you now.”
My parents had made the threat, then hidden it from everybody who mattered.
I put the bootie in Fabian’s hand.
“You were never a mistake. Not for one minute.”
“Neither was bringing you home,” Daniel said to him. “But I was wrong about your mother.”
Fabian crouched beside my bed.
My parents had made the threat.
When I reached for him, he put his arms around me.
I held the son I’d last held as a newborn.
“You don’t have to call me anything,” I said. “I don’t expect you to feel what I feel yet.”
He squeezed my fingers.
“Could we start with you staying in touch after you leave here?”
I reached for him.
“Yes,” I said, before he finished asking. “We can do that.”
Daniel waited until we drew apart. “Can you ever forgive me?”
“I don’t know yet. But you can stay. Tell me what he was like.”
A few weeks later, they came for soup.
Daniel brought photographs. Fabian showed me a gap-toothed boy holding his first fish.
“Can you ever forgive me?”
“Dad claims he caught it. I did.”
“I held the net,” Daniel said.
I looked from the photograph to my son’s face.
There would be other questions, and anger I hadn’t finished with. But they were here to answer.
“What happened next?” I asked.
I looked from the photograph to my son’s face.
