the house for months. I didn’t know your daughter was pregnant. Michael never knew — he died before she could tell him, if she even knew herself yet.
And then, months later, a girl showed up at my door. Pregnant. Terrified. Holding a photo of my son.
It was Emily.
She’d found me. She’d learned Michael died, and she’d come to tell me that his child was going to be born, that some part of him was still coming into the world, and she didn’t know what to do with that, and she needed someone who’d loved him to know.”
I couldn’t breathe. Ten years of “I don’t know,” ten years of a boy asking who his father was, and the answer had been a nineteen-year-old named Michael who’d made my daughter happy for one summer and died before he ever knew he’d be a father.
