My baby was the size of a blueberry, according to the app on my phone. A blueberry growing in the middle of a family implosion.
“Did you ever love Robert?” I asked.
The silence stretched so long I thought she might hang up.
Then she said, “In the beginning, I loved being rescued. I mistook that for love because I was young.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” she said softly. “It isn’t.”
Monday morning, I went to work because staying home felt worse.
By noon, I was sitting in my office staring at a student’s college essay while the words swam on the page. At one-thirty, my secretary knocked and said a man was asking for me in the front office.
I assumed it was Andrew.
It wasn’t.
The man standing near the reception desk was in his late fifties, sun-browned, broad-shouldered, with worn jeans, a denim shirt, and hands that looked like they had actually built things. He turned when I entered.
And my breath caught.
He had Andrew’s eyes.
Not exactly. Age had changed them, lined them, darkened them.
But the shape. The directness. The strange softness that sat under intensity.
“I’m Jack Mercer,” he said.
The world seemed to go quiet around us.
“I figured,” I said.
He gave a crooked nod and gestured toward the empty guidance conference room. “Could we talk?”
I should have refused.
I led him in anyway.
Once the door closed, he stayed standing.
“I’m not here to make things worse,” he said.
I almost laughed at that.
“I don’t think that’s possible anymore.”
Pain crossed his face. “Fair enough.”
He pulled a folded photograph from his pocket and set it on the table between us.
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