I told her about Daniel.
“You have a brother,” I said one night, while she was eating and the rest of the world was asleep.
“He’s five, and he builds rockets, and he has your dad’s eyes.
You’ll meet him when you’re older.
I’ll make sure of it.”
She didn’t respond, because she was six days old and had other priorities.
But I said it out loud, and that made it real.
—
Ruth came three times a week.
She brought food, held the baby, and did the dishes without being asked.
We didn’t talk about Mark’s secret again for a long time.
We didn’t need to.
We were both living inside the consequences of it, and that was enough.
One afternoon she was washing up at the sink and I was feeding Josephine on the sofa, and she said, without turning around:
“He talked about you, you know.
Even at the end.
He said you were the best decision he ever made.”
I looked at the back of her head.
“He made some bad decisions,” I said.
“Yes.” She kept washing.
“He did.
But not that one.”
I didn’t answer.
But I held Josephine a little closer, and I didn’t argue.
—
I called Diane on a Thursday afternoon in January.
“How’s the recovery?” I asked.
“Good.
Back at work full-time now.
Daniel started a new term and he’s obsessed with dinosaurs, so that’s the current situation.”
“Josephine is obsessed with the ceiling fan.”
Diane laughed.
“They’re very similar at that age.”
“I was thinking,” I said.
“In the spring, when things are a bit easier — would you want to bring Daniel over?
Just for an afternoon.
Nothing formal.
He could meet Josephine.
They could ignore each other the way babies and five-year-olds do.”
A pause.
“Yes,” Diane said.
“I think I’d like that.”
“Me too.”
After I hung up, I sat for a while in the quiet of the living room.
Josephine was asleep in her chair.
The winter light was coming through the window at a low angle, the way it does in January, making everything look a little softer than it is.
On the mantelpiece was a photograph of Mark — one I had taken on the porch the summer before he got sick, squinting into the sun the same way Daniel had squinted in his photograph.
