“No. Tell me why I’m here.”
“Please.”
“Tell me.”
He looked toward the floor.
“There’s something I need to ask you,” he said. “But you have to hear everything first.”
My mind immediately went somewhere awful.
A newborn girl.
My husband.
A hospital.
Of course I thought it.
I looked through the glass again.
Then back at him.
“Is she yours?”
James looked horrified.
“What?”
“Is that your baby?”
“No.”
His answer came instantly.
“No. God, no.”
“Then whose is she?”
James rubbed both hands over his face.
“Do you remember Anna?”
The name stirred something in my memory.
Anna had been part of James’s life long before I was.
His first serious relationship.
His first love.
They had been young, maybe twenty-two, and apparently believed they would marry someday.
Then they broke up.
Anna eventually married someone else.
James met me.
That was all I knew.
“I remember her,” I said.
“I haven’t spoken to her in eleven years.”
I watched him carefully.
“Not once?”
