I searched the toolbox again.
We brought home a premature baby girl.
Beneath a tray of screws, I found a black address book with a cracked spine.
Most of the numbers had been crossed out, but one name remained clear.
Rose.
My thumb hovered over the phone number.
Then I used our landline to call.
The line rang five times.
I found a black address book.
“Hello?” a woman answered.
Her voice was older and cautious.
Silence stretched between us.
“Richard?” she whispered, recognizing our landline. “Is that really you?”
I gripped the tangled plastic coil of the receiver.
“This isn’t Richard. It’s his wife.”
“Is that really you?”
A cup touched a hard surface on her end of the line. Then she began to cry.
“You finally found me,” she said. “I thought this day would never come.”
“Who are you?”
Rose did not answer.
“What does Claire have to do with you?”
Her breathing slowed.
“I can’t tell you over the phone.”
“Who are you?”
“You can tell me right now.”
“No.” Her voice remained gentle. “Some truths should not arrive without a face attached to them.”
She gave me the address of a diner in the next town.
I took the photograph and drove away before Richard came home. My hands shook so badly that I missed the turn twice.
“You can tell me right now.”
***
Rose was already sitting in the last booth.
Her hair had gone silver, but I recognized her immediately.
She held a coffee cup between both hands.
“You’re Evelyn,” she said.
“And you’re the woman on my husband’s chest.”
Her fingers stopped moving.
“You’re Evelyn.”
I placed the photograph between us.
“What is this?”
Rose looked down at it. Her shoulders dropped, aching with the sudden lightness.
Before she could answer, the bell above the diner door rang.
Richard walked in.
Her shoulders dropped.
He saw me first.
Then he saw Rose.
His face went white.
He did not look like a man caught with a lover. He looked like a man who had arrived at the end of a promise.
Rose stood halfway, then sat again.
“I called him,” she told me. Then she turned to him. “Did you keep it?”
Richard removed his coat but did not join us.
“Every day.”
“Did you keep it?”
He reached into his wallet and pulled out a folded square of paper. The creases had worn nearly transparent. He placed it beside the photograph.
Rose did not touch it.
I opened the note.
“Promise me she’ll always grow up believing she was wanted. Never make her feel like someone gave her away.”
I read it again.
Rose did not touch it.
Then I looked at Richard.
“Who is ‘she’?”
He slid into the booth beside me, leaving a few inches of space between us.
Neither of them spoke.
The waitress approached with a coffeepot, glanced at our table, and quietly turned around.
“Richard?”
Neither of them spoke.
His eyes remained on the note.
