Dad looked up from the sink, hands covered in dish soap. “Emily—”
“I know you want to protect me. But this is part of my life now. Ryan lied about her. He lied about everything. If Claire knows something about him, about Linda, about the clinic, I need to understand it before my baby is born.”
He dried his hands slowly. “We do it carefully.”
“We?”
“You didn’t think I was letting my seven-months-pregnant daughter chase a mystery alone, did you?”
I almost smiled. “There’s the commanding officer.”
“There’s the father.”
The investigator, a woman named Ruth Alvarez, came to the house two days later. She was in her sixties, with silver hair cut to her jaw and reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She carried a leather folder and spoke like someone who disliked wasting words.
“I found Claire,” she said.
My hands tightened around my mug.
“She lives under her middle name now. Anna Claire Whitman. Works part-time at a library outside Milwaukee.”
Dad sat straighter. “Is she safe to contact?”
“I believe so. But she has gone to some trouble to remain hard to find.”
“Because of Ryan?” I asked.
Ruth looked at me carefully. “That is what we need to ask her.”
She slid a photograph across the table. It showed a woman in a green coat leaving a library, her hair tucked beneath a knit hat. She looked ordinary. Tired, maybe. Human.
Nothing like the ghost I had imagined.
“There’s something else,” Ruth said.
Dad’s jaw tightened. “What?”
“Claire has a child.”
The kitchen clock ticked once. Twice.
“A little boy,” Ruth continued. “About three.”
My vision blurred. Three years earlier. The ultrasound. Baby Carter.
Ryan’s child.
My baby’s half brother.
Dad reached for my hand, but I was already standing, one palm pressed against my belly.
“I need air.”
He followed me to the porch but gave me space. The cold wind touched my face, carrying the scent of damp leaves and distant woodsmoke. Across the street, a neighbor’s dog barked. Somewhere, life continued as if revelations were not quietly rearranging the ground beneath me.
A little boy.
I wondered if he had Ryan’s eyes. I wondered if Claire watched him sleep the way I already imagined watching my own child. I wondered what she had escaped with him in her arms.
And I wondered why Ryan had pretended they did not exist.
