Chapter 5 - Everyone Who Knew
"My mother," Erin said.
Callie shut her eyes for a moment. "Grandma Joan."
"She was with me the night Rachel went into the hospital. She helped me carry you through our front door."
"Does she know that I don't know?"
"Yes."
Callie sat back down. She dragged the certificate across the table and read it again, slow, the way you reread a test score hoping the number will move.
"Anybody else?" I asked.
"Our old family doctor. Dr. Langford. He signed the paperwork through." Erin paused. "He retired four years ago. Moved out to Arizona."
"That's the list?"
"That's the list."
Callie set the paper down flat. "So Grandma Joan has sat next to me at every holiday for eighteen years, holding my hand while she said grace, knowing I had no idea who I was."
"She wanted to tell you. She asked me more than once. We fought about it."
"But you told her no."
"I told her no."
Callie nodded, slow. It wasn't forgiveness. She was just taking it in, piece by piece.
I turned to Adrian. "What do you want out of this?"
He didn't dodge it. "Nothing that isn't already hers. I'm not here to be anybody's father. I know that chair's taken." He glanced at Callie. "I came because I gave Rachel my word that I'd show up one time, when she was grown, and let her decide for herself whether she wanted to know where she started."
"And if I don't?" Callie said.
"Then I get in my car, and you never hear my name again."
Callie looked at him a long time.
"Did you love her? My biological mother?"
Adrian was quiet for a while.
"I was twenty-seven and stupid," he finally said. "I cared about her more than I had the sense to understand back then. I've spent a lot of years being sorry it took me so long to figure that out."
Callie let that sit.
Outside, the party was still going. Somebody had turned on the Bluetooth speaker we'd set up that morning, and music floated in through the screen door. It sounded like it was coming from another year.
"I need to call Grandma Joan," Callie said.
"Callie—" Erin started.
"I'm not asking." She picked her phone up off the table and walked out. We heard her go up the stairs. We heard her bedroom door close.
The three of us sat there and didn't talk.
Adrian stood. "I should go."
"Not yet," I said.
He sat back down.
I looked at my wife. "Is there anything else. Anything at all you haven't said."
She hesitated.
My stomach went out from under me. "Erin."
"There's a letter," she said. "From Rachel. She wrote it in the hospital bed. She asked me to give it to Callie on her eighteenth birthday." Erin got up, went to the cabinet over the refrigerator, reached all the way to the back, and brought down a small wooden box I had never seen in my life.
She set it on the table between us.
"I've been keeping it for eighteen years."
"You've had that in this house," I said. "The whole time. Where I make coffee every morning."
"Yes."
From upstairs, Callie's voice came down through the floor — low, then all at once loud and sharp. Then nothing. Then her feet, fast on the stairs.
May you like
She came back into the kitchen doorway. Her face had changed again.
"Grandma Joan didn't just know," Callie said. "She told me there's more. She said there's something about why my mother — why Rachel — actually d!ed." She looked straight at Erin. "She said it wasn't just complications. She said you know what really happened to her."
