A crooked photograph of our Christmas tree. A pigeon on a trash can that Daniel had apparently considered worthy of preserving forever.
By the tenth picture, I was crying and smiling at the same time.
I kept scrolling.
Then a woman appeared.
I frowned.
She was standing beside Daniel outside a coffee shop, smiling into the camera.
I frowned.
I had never seen her before. Maybe a coworker. Maybe someone from school.
Then came another photograph.
She was wearing Daniel’s gray sweatshirt.
Another.
He loved her.
They were holding hands.
Another.
Daniel was looking at her, not at the camera, with an expression I knew immediately.
He loved her.
That realization hurt in a way I had not expected.
My son had been in love, and I had known nothing about it.
I clicked again.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I whispered.
I clicked again and stopped breathing.
Daniel was kneeling in front of the woman. She was visibly pregnant.
His hands rested gently on either side of her stomach, and he was kissing the curve of it.
I stopped crying.
For several seconds, I only stared.
She was visibly pregnant.
Then I clicked again.
Daniel behind her, arms wrapped around her waist.
Another photograph.
An ultrasound image.
Then several photographs that were unmistakably a maternity shoot.
I grabbed a piece of paper and started checking dates. My fingers trembled as I counted backward.
An ultrasound image.
Daniel had died months before that baby would have been born.
“Who are you?” I whispered at the woman on the screen.
Was the baby Daniel’s? Why hadn’t he told me?
Had he planned to?
And then came the question that made my heart pound harder than all the others.
What if that child was still out there?
I was going to find her.
I stared at the photographs for another moment, then pulled a notebook toward me.
I had lost Daniel once without knowing the whole story.
I wasn’t going to walk away from it now.
Somewhere in those photographs was a woman who might have carried my son’s child.
And I was going to find her.
I had lost Daniel once
I stopped looking at the photographs like a mother. I started looking at them like evidence.
I pulled a notebook closer and went through every image again, writing down anything that might matter.
Dates.
Street signs.
Storefronts.
Names on envelopes.
Anything printed clearly enough to read.
Rachel.
The ultrasound photograph gave me the first real clue. I enlarged it until the image blurred around the edges.
Most of the patient information was cut off, but one thing remained visible.
Rachel.
Below it was the name of a clinic and a date. I stared at the date for a long time.
It fit.
I called the clinic.
If the baby was Daniel’s, Rachel would have been exactly that far along when the picture was taken.
The next morning, I called the clinic.
“I’m trying to locate someone who was a patient there in 2000,” I explained.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said kindly, “but we can’t confirm whether someone was ever treated here.”
Even after twenty-six years.
I went back to the photographs.
I understood. That didn’t make hanging up any less frustrating.
So I went back to the photographs.
This time, I noticed something I had missed before.
Rachel was sitting at a kitchen table in one candid shot, laughing while Daniel apparently took the picture without warning.
Behind her were several envelopes.
I wrote both down.
I enlarged the image.
One address was mostly hidden. Another was turned sideways. But on the third, I could make out part of a street name and an apartment number.
I wrote both down.
That afternoon, I went to the public library. I searched old city directories first, then archived newspapers and community notices.
Nothing.
I went to the public library.
Then I found an old church bulletin scanned into the local archive. There, buried beneath announcements about bake sales and choir practice, was a birth notice.
A woman named Rachel, with the same address, had given birth to a baby boy several months after Daniel died.
