And then, months later, a girl showed up at my door. Pregnant. Terrified. Holding a photo of my son.
It was Emily.
She'd found me. She'd learned Michael died, and she'd come to tell me that his child was going to be born, that some part of him was still coming into the world, and she didn't know what to do with that, and she needed someone who'd loved him to know."
I couldn't breathe. Ten years of "I don't know," ten years of a boy asking who his father was, and the answer had been a nineteen-year-old named Michael who'd made my daughter happy for one summer and died before he ever knew he'd be a father.
"Why didn't she tell me?" I asked. "Why did she keep it from her own mother?"
And Margaret handed me the envelope, and said, "She explains it herself. Read it. She wrote it near the end of her pregnancy. She made me promise, if anything happened to her, to make sure you got it — and to give you time, and space, and to only come when the boy was old enough to understand. I waited too long. I was afraid. But she's been waiting ten years to tell you this herself. Read it, Diane."
