“No,” Richard said.
“I don’t understand.”
He rubbed one thumb over 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.”
“Is she Rose’s daughter?”
For several seconds, I could not fit those words into the story I had already built.
I had imagined an affair.
A secret child.
Richard bringing another woman’s baby into our home while I thanked him for choosing adoption.
I had not imagined a nurse.
I had imagined an affair.
Rose stared into her coffee.
“Claire was born more than ten weeks early,” she said. “She spent almost four months in the neonatal unit.”
“I know that.”
“You know what the agency told you, Evelyn.”
“They said she had been abandoned shortly after birth,” I choked out.
“You know what the agency told you, Evelyn.”
Rose’s spoon clicked against the saucer.
“No one came back for her,” she whispered.
The diner seemed to grow louder around us.
Rose kept her voice low.
“She was so small that she could only wrap two tiny fingers around the tip of mine. She hated the monitoring leads. She worked one foot out of the blanket no matter how tightly we tucked her in.”
“No one came back for her.”
A faint smile crossed her face.
“The other nurses called her stubborn.”
“What did you call her?” I asked.
“Determined.”
I looked at the photograph again.
