Part 4

“Of course.”

She folded her hands, then unfolded them. “I had no idea about the children. Grant told me his first marriage ended because you made up a pregnancy to keep him from taking a job.”

I set the coffee pot down. The old accusation still had a way of finding the tenderest place in me.

“That’s what he told you?”

“Yes.” Natalie looked down. “I’m sorry. I can see now that I heard only his version. Why did he invite you today?”

“He said his mother wanted to see me before she sold the house.”

Natalie’s mouth tightened. “He told me this would give him closure. I’m beginning to wonder what he meant by that.”

Before I could answer, Grant came into the kitchen.

“Is everything all right?”

Natalie picked up her water glass. “It is. I’m going back to sit with your mother.”

She passed him without looking at him.

Grant watched her leave, then turned to me. “Could we talk in the study?”

Through the doorway, I could see the children playing a board game with their cousins. Their laughter rose above the low murmur of the dining room.

“All right,” I said.

The study looked much as it had eight years earlier, with dark shelves, old photographs, and two leather chairs angled toward a desk. Seeing it again brought back the afternoon I had told Grant I was pregnant. I remembered his expression, the quick turn from surprise to suspicion, as though he had been waiting for a reason not to believe me.

Grant leaned against the desk. “I don’t know where to start.”

“The beginning is usually a good place.”

He rubbed his forehead. “I know I deserve your anger.”

“I’m not here to decide what you deserve,” I said. “I’m here to make sure the children feel safe.”

“They’re our children.”

“Biologically, yes. But you haven’t been part of their lives.”

He looked toward the window, where snow covered the lawn. “I truly believed you were lying back then.”

“You believed it because it gave you the easiest way out.”

He shook his head. “We’d been arguing. I’d accepted the transfer, and then you told me you were pregnant.”

“You accepted a job overseas without asking your wife what she thought,” I said. “Two days after I told you about the pregnancy, you filed for divorce and stopped answering my calls.”

His voice grew quieter. “I was twenty-seven. I was scared. I felt trapped by everything I’d chosen, and I was ashamed that part of me wanted to leave. When someone suggested you might be lying, I grabbed onto that because it made running seem easier.”

I kept my hands folded in my lap. “Three weeks later, I sat in an ultrasound room by myself and watched the technician find four separate heartbeats.”

Grant closed his eyes. “I can’t imagine what that was like.”

“I didn’t have to imagine it. I was there.” I paused, then continued. “My parents helped me. Marcy helped me. Friends showed up when I needed them. I built a life in Phoenix, and I raised the children with more love than I thought one house could hold. But none of that makes what you did acceptable.”

He stared down at the rug. After a while, he asked, “Why didn’t you contact me after they were born?”

I looked at him. “I did.”

He shook his head. “I never received anything.”

“I sent a certified package to this house on March eighteenth, eight years ago. It had copies of the birth certificates, hospital records, photographs, and an offer to arrange a DNA test.”

Grant’s face changed. “I never saw it.”