For 20 years, my husband insisted the woman tattooed over his heart wasn’t real. I almost believed him until I found an old photograph hidden in his garage, and the six words on the back sent me searching for someone I was never supposed to meet.
The photograph slipped from beneath a loose panel in Richard’s toolbox and landed face-up on the garage floor.
At first, I only noticed the yellowed edges.
Then I saw her.
The photograph slipped from beneath a loose panel.
She was younger than the woman tattooed over Richard’s heart, but the eyes were the same.
So was the small rose behind her left ear.
In her arms was a newborn wrapped in a cream-colored blanket.
Claire’s coming-home blanket.
I lowered myself onto the concrete because my legs had stopped cooperating.
She was younger.
The garage smelled of sawdust, motor oil, and the rain blowing in through the half-open door.
On the back of the photograph, Richard had written six words.
“Forgive me, Rose. She can’t know.”
***
Twenty years earlier, on our honeymoon, Richard had stepped out of the hotel bathroom with a towel around his waist.
That was the first time I saw the tattoo.
“Forgive me, Rose. She can’t know.”
A beautiful young woman stared up from his chest.
Her dark hair fell over one shoulder.
The rose behind her ear was no bigger than a thumbnail.
“Who is she?” I asked.
Richard glanced down as though he had forgotten she was there.
“Nobody.”
“Who is she?”
“Nobody gets tattooed over your heart, Richie.”
He laughed and pulled me close. “The artist invented her when I was 19. I told him to draw something beautiful.”
I trusted him blindly.
I held onto his words through five failed fertility treatments, and I clung to them the afternoon the doctor advised us to stop trying.
I trusted him blindly.
But I truly believed him the morning we brought home a premature baby girl with dark eyes, a stubborn cry, and a cream blanket tucked around her legs.
Now that blanket was in Rose’s arms.
