“Is Claire your daughter?”
The response came immediately.
“Is she Rose’s daughter?”
Rose turned toward the window.
“No,” Richard answered.
He ran one thumb along the edge of the old note.
“Rose was the neonatal nurse who quietly changed the way I understood compassion years before I ever met you.”
For several seconds, I could not fit those words into the version of the story I had already constructed.
I had imagined an affair.
A hidden daughter.
Richard bringing another woman’s child into our home while I thanked him for agreeing to adopt.
I had never imagined a nurse.
Rose stared into her coffee.
“Claire was born more than ten weeks early,” she said. “She spent almost four months in the neonatal unit.”
“You know what the agency told you, Evelyn.”
“They said she had been abandoned shortly after birth,” I choked out.
Rose’s spoon tapped the saucer.
