Chapter 1 - The Visit Margaret Never Told Me About
Claire stepped aside and let me into her house.
For several seconds, I remained near the doorway because my legs suddenly felt unreliable.
The living room was warm and simple. Family photographs covered one wall. A knitted blanket rested across the couch. Somewhere deeper in the house, an old clock ticked loudly enough to make the silence uncomfortable.
Claire pointed toward a chair.
“Sit down, David.”
Hearing my name in her voice after almost forty years did something strange to me.
I sat.
She remained standing.
“You said you came looking for me?”
Claire nodded.
“About eight months after you moved away.”
I stared at her.
“That’s impossible.”
“No.”
“You knew where I was?”
“I found out.”
My mind raced backward through decades.
After college, I had moved to Ohio for a management trainee position. Claire and I had argued for weeks about whether she should come with me. Eventually she told me she couldn’t leave her mother, who was seriously ill.
I proposed anyway.
Claire cried.
Then she said no.
I assumed that was the end.
“So why did you come?”
Claire’s hands tightened around each other.
“Because I changed my mind.”
I felt as though someone had punched me directly in the chest.
“You changed your mind?”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t you find me?”
“I tried.”
She finally sat across from me.
“I went to your parents’ house first. Your mother told me you’d already moved into an apartment near your new job. She gave me the address.”
I remembered that apartment.
One bedroom.
Third floor.
Leaking bathroom faucet.
The place where, months later, I first met Margaret at a coworker’s birthday dinner.
Claire looked directly into my eyes.
“When I arrived, Margaret opened the door.”
I stopped breathing.
“That can’t be right.”
“It is.”
“But Margaret didn’t move in with me until almost a year after we started dating.”
“I know.”
The clock continued ticking.
Claire’s voice became quieter.
“She told me she was your girlfriend.”
My stomach turned.
“What?”
“She said you two were serious. She said you had already told her about me and that you wanted nothing more to do with me.”
I stood so suddenly that the chair scraped the floor.
“Margaret and I weren’t dating then.”
Claire’s face crumpled slightly.
“I know that now.”
I walked toward the window.
Thirty-six years of memories suddenly rearranged themselves in my mind.
Margaret meeting me at that birthday dinner.
Margaret somehow already knowing what music I liked.
Margaret laughing when I mentioned college.
Margaret saying she had once seen me around town before we officially met.
Little things.
Things that had never mattered.
Until now.
I turned.
“Why would she do that?”
Claire’s eyes filled with tears.
“Because she already knew who you were.”
“How?”
Claire hesitated.
Then she stood and walked toward an antique desk.
From the bottom drawer, she removed a yellowed envelope.
My name was written across the front.
In handwriting I recognized instantly.
Margaret’s.
Claire handed it to me.
“She gave me this the day I came looking for you.”
I opened it with trembling fingers.
Inside was a single page.
Claire,
David has chosen a different future. Please respect that and never contact him again. If you truly love him, let him go.
Margaret.
I stared at the page.
Then I noticed something written faintly at the bottom.
Not in Margaret’s handwriting.
Claire had added it later.
I looked at her.
“What does this date mean?”
Her lips trembled.
“That was the day I came to tell you something else.”
“What?”
May you like
Claire closed her eyes.
“I was pregnant.”
