Rick appeared behind me. “Anna?”
“Tell her who William is.”
She pulled away. Her eyes locked on him.
“Ask your husband. Make him confess what he did!”
In that moment, I stopped wondering why Anna had left and started wondering who I had married.
Rick went pale.
I turned to him. “What did you do?”
He frowned. “What? What the hell is she talking about?”
“How do you know that name?”
Anna’s whole body shook – not from cold, but from fury. “Then tell her who William is.”
The name landed somewhere deep and old inside me. I had not spoken it aloud in almost twenty years.
“How do you know that name?” I whispered.
Anna pointed at my husband. “From him.”
There was only one problem: I had never told Rick about William.
“I found two old photos.”
I turned to Rick. “How do you know that name?”
“Claire, let Anna explain.”
“No. I’m asking you.”
He looked away.
Anna stepped between us. “Mom. Sit down. There’s more.”
The guy looked so much like me.
My daughter knelt in front of the couch, and for the first time in a month I saw her clearly.
“Three weeks before the wedding, Rick sent me for his passport. In his drawer, I found two old photos.”
“What photos?”
She swallowed. “You were in both of them, Mom. In one, you were standing next to some guy. In the other, you were kissing him.”
“Claire and William.”
“Oh God, no,” I whispered.
“I thought it was Dad at first. The guy looked so much like me. Same eyes. Same chin.”
I looked at Rick.
“Anna, this is ridiculous.”
“But then I turned one of the photos over,” she continued. “There were two names on the back.”
My face went cold. “No…”
I already knew the name before she said it.
“How do you know William?”
“Claire and William.”
Tears filled my eyes.
“I asked Rick who William was. He grabbed the photos from me and told me they meant nothing. But he kept asking why I was interested in him and whether I’d told you what I found.”
I turned to Rick. “Why were you so afraid of me seeing those photos?”
“I wasn’t afraid.”
“Then answer the question. How do you know William?”
Different last names.
Rick rubbed a hand over his face and backed toward the kitchen.
“Don’t walk away from me,” I said.
He stopped.
Anna looked at me. “Because William is his brother, Mom.”
“Anna…” Rick started.
“Your brother?”
His face tightened. “Half brother.”
“I needed answers.”
“And you knew he was my William?”
Rick looked away. “Our parents divorced when we were kids. He stayed with our father. I stayed with our mother. Different last names.”
I turned back to my daughter. “Is that why you left?”
Anna shook her head. “Not exactly.”
“Then where have you been for a month?”
“Call him, Mom.”
She hesitated. “With William.”
“You found him?”
“His address wasn’t hard to find.” Anna sank onto the couch. “I needed answers.”
I sat across from her. “Then tell me what you found.”
She shook her head. “Some of it isn’t mine to tell.”
“Anna…”
“I passed the letters through Rick.”
She pulled out her phone. “Call him, Mom.”
Rick stepped toward us. “Claire, don’t.”
I turned on him. “Why not?”
“Because you don’t know what he’s going to tell you.”
I held out my hand to Anna. “Exactly.”
She placed the phone in my palm.
“I never got them.”
William answered on the fourth ring.
His voice cracked when he heard mine. “I wrote to you, Claire. For months. I passed the letters through Rick.”
Across the room, my “husband” went completely still.
I closed my eyes. “Rick?”
“He said he’d make sure you got them.”
I remembered kissing him.
Rick shook his head. “Claire, it wasn’t like that.”
I held up a hand without looking at him. “I never got them,” I told William.
Silence.
Then William said, “I got one back. Said you’d met someone else. That you didn’t want me contacting you again.”
“I never sent that.”
After we hung up, I pulled my old box from under the bed.
I wrote again and again.
My unfinished letter telling William I was pregnant was still inside.
For a second, I was nineteen again. My first love, William, and I were sitting on the hood of his car, sharing fries and laughing about nothing.
I remembered kissing him in my mother’s kitchen and believing we’d figure everything out.
Then his father decided I was ruining William’s future. Soon after, William was gone.
I wrote again and again. Nothing came back.
“Did you ask him if he could be your father?”
By the time I found out I was pregnant, I already believed he had chosen to leave me. I wrote one last letter telling him about the baby – but I never sent it.
I looked at the letter in my hands. Then I looked at the date.
William had left less than a year before Anna was born.
My stomach dropped.
Daniel had raised Anna from the day she was born. He was her father in every way that mattered.
99.99 percent.
But suddenly I was staring at a question I had never let myself ask.
“Anna, when you found William… did you ask him if he could be your father?”
Anna pulled a folded envelope from her jacket and slid it across the table.
“We did the test.”
William. Biological father. 99.99 percent.
I read it twice before the words finally sank in.
“I never saw this…”
