Stephen dropped the box. It was wrapped in silver paper with a purple ribbon. He had spent twenty minutes in a toy store picking out what was inside. He had texted me a picture of the wrapping job from his car, very proud of himself. Look at these corners. Professional quality. Now it hit the hallway floor with a soft thud and rolled against the baseboard. He didn’t pick it up. He was staring at my four-year-old daughter. Lucy had come running around the corner from the living room, the way she always did when the doorbell rang. She had skidded to a stop on the hardwood in her socks, right beside my leg. She was wearing the blue sundress she had picked out herself, and two braids that had taken me half an hour to get right. She looked up at him and smiled her shy little smile. And Stephen, the calmest, steadiest man I had ever dated, went white as a sheet. “Oh no,” he whispered. “I know her.” For a second, I thought I had heard him wrong. “What do you mean, you know her?” He didn’t answer. His eyes were fixed on Lucy. Not on me. On her. He was looking at her the way you would look at a ghost. Lucy pressed herself closer to my leg. She grabbed a fistful of my jeans. “Mommy,” she whispered, “did I do something wrong?” “No, sweetheart.” I bent down and hugged her. My heart was pounding. “No. You didn’t do anything wrong. Why don’t you go check on your crayons? I’ll be there in one minute.” She looked up at Stephen one more time. Then she let go of my jeans and wandered slowly back into the living room, glancing over her shoulder twice. I stood up. “Stephen,” I said. “You’re scaring me.” I need to back up and tell you how we got to that hallway. Because if you had told me an hour earlier that this night would go wrong, I’d have laughed at you. I had been planning it for a month. I had been nervous about it for a year. My name is Claire. I’m thirty-two years old. I have a four-year-old daughter named Lucy. She’s the best thing I’ve ever done. She has a laugh like a hiccup and she sleeps with her feet on my face and she’s convinced that the moon follows our car because it likes us. I’ve been divorced from her father, Mark, for two years. It wasn’t a dramatic divorce. Nobody threw dishes. Nobody cheated, not during the marriage anyway. We just got tired. We had been trying to hold something together that kept slipping through our fingers, and one day we both looked at each other across the kitchen table and knew it was done. Mark’s a good dad. I’ll say that about him forever. He has Lucy every other weekend and every Wednesday night, and he’s never missed one. Not once. He lives in an apartment fifteen minutes away with a blanket fort permanently set up in the living room. But after the divorce, I made myself a rule. No men around Lucy. Not unless it was serious. Not unless I was sure. I’d seen it happen to other kids. A friend of mine from work had a parade of boyfriends through her house after her divorce, and her son would get attached to every single one, and then they would disappear. He started asking every new man who came to the door, “Are you going to stay?” I wasn’t going to do that to Lucy. So I dated a little. Not much. Coffee here. Dinner there. A man from my gym who talked about protein powder for two hours. A dentist who cried about his ex-wife in the middle of our appetizers. None of them ever got near my daughter. Then I met Stephen. It was a little over a year before that night in the hallway. My friend Rachel set us up. Rachel is my oldest friend. We’ve known each other since we were eight. She’s loud and bossy and has absolutely no filter, and she’s been right about every important thing in my life. “He works in my building,” she said. “Fourth floor. Finance. He’s thirty-five. He’s tall. He’s quiet. He holds the elevator for people. He’s never once tried to tell me about cryptocurrency.” “That’s your whole pitch?” “Claire, that’s a great pitch. Do you know how many men in that building have tried to tell me about cryptocurrency?” So I went. We met at a little Italian place downtown. He was already there when I arrived, sitting at a table by the window. He stood up when I walked in. He was tall, like Rachel said, with dark hair going gray at the temples and kind brown eyes and a slightly crooked smile. Before we had even ordered, I told him about Lucy. I always did that. On every first date. I wanted to see how they reacted. Some men’s faces fell. Some men changed the subject. One man actually said, “Oh. So, like, she lives with you?” Stephen just smiled. “How old is she?” “Three. Almost four.” “What’s she like?” Nobody had ever asked me that on a first date. What’s she like. So I told him. I told him about how she named all her stuffed animals after vegetables. About how she was terrified of the vacuum cleaner but not of spiders. About the moon following our car. He laughed at all the right places. He asked questions. Real ones. “I love kids,” he said when I finally stopped talking. “I always have. I hope I get to have a family of my own someday.” He said it simply. Not like he was trying to impress me. Like it was just true. That was the first moment I liked him. Stephen worked for one of the big insurance companies in town. He had been there eleven years. He had a small house on the east side with a vegetable garden he was very serious about. He ran every morning at six. He read history books. He called his mother every Sunday. He was thoughtful. Patient. Genuinely kind. On our third date, it rained, and he gave me his jacket and walked me to my car and stood there getting soaked until I had pulled out of the parking lot. On our fifth date, I mentioned that Lucy had been sick with a cold all week. The next day, there was a little bag hanging on my front doorknob. Inside was a box of the kind of tissues with lotion in them, a coloring book about cats, and a note. For the patient. Get well soon. — A friend of your mom’s. Lucy didn’t know who Stephen was. She just knew that “a friend of Mommy’s” had sent her a cat coloring book. She colored every single page that week. Over the next year, the gifts kept coming. Never anything big. Never anything that felt like he was trying too hard. Just little things. A stuffed giraffe when I told him she had started kindergarten prep. A book about a dragon who was afraid of the dark, when I said she had been having nightmares. A tiny pair of rain boots with frogs on them, when I mentioned hers had gotten too small. “How did you know her size?” I asked. “You told me,” he said. “Two months ago. You said she was a toddler eleven and growing like a weed.” I didn’t even remember saying it. Lucy started calling him “Mommy’s Gift Friend.” She drew him a picture once. A tall stick man with a giant present. She asked me to give it to him. He put it on his refrigerator. I saw it there the next time I went to his house. He had put it right in the middle, under a magnet shaped like a lemon. Over that year, our relationship grew into something serious. We went away for a weekend to a cabin on a lake while Lucy was at Mark’s. We met each other’s friends. He came to my work Christmas party and charmed everybody, even my boss, who doesn’t like anyone. He told me about his family. His parents, Patricia and Robert, still lived in the house he grew up in, about an hour north. His dad was a retired high school science teacher. His mom ran a small bakery for twenty years and still baked bread every morning out of habit. He mentioned once, very briefly, that he had had a brother who died. “A car accident,” he said. “Three years ago.” “I’m so sorry.” “Thank you.” He looked down at his plate. “I don’t really talk about it much. Not yet. Maybe someday.” I didn’t push. I knew what grief felt like. I knew you can’t rush somebody into talking about the worst thing that ever happened to them. I didn’t ask his brother’s name. I wish I had. For the first time since my divorce, I could imagine building a future with someone. Real things. A house with a yard. Stephen teaching Lucy to ride a bike. Stephen at the kitchen table helping her with her homework. Maybe, someday, a little brother or sister. But there was one thing I still hadn’t done. I hadn’t introduced him to Lucy. A whole year. Gifts on the doorknob. A picture on his refrigerator. And he had never once been in the same room with her. I know that sounds strange. But I had made myself that rule, and I meant to keep it. I didn’t want her getting attached to someone who might not stay. Stephen never pushed. Not once. “Whenever you’re ready,” he would say. “There’s no rush. She’s the most important person in your life. I’d be worried about you if you didn’t protect her.” That made me love him more. Then, in May, we celebrated our first anniversary. He took me back to the same Italian restaurant. Same table by the window. Over dessert, he reached across the table and took my hand. “I want you to know something,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m in this. Whatever you need. However long it takes.” I looked at him for a long time. And I decided. “Come to dinner,” I said. “Next Saturday. At my house. I want you to meet her.” His whole face lit up. “Really?” “Really.” “Claire.” He squeezed my hand. “I’m going to be so nervous.” “She’s four. She’s going to ask you if you like broccoli and whether you’ve ever seen a real shark.” “Have I seen a real shark?” he said, frowning. “Do aquariums count?” “She’ll accept aquariums.” “Thank God.” I spent the whole week preparing Lucy. “Mommy has a special friend,” I told her at breakfast on Monday. “His name is Stephen. He’s the one who sends you presents.” Her eyes got huge. “The Gift Friend?” “The Gift Friend. And he’s going to come over for dinner on Saturday. Would you like that?” She thought about it very seriously, chewing her waffle. “Does he like broccoli?” “I’m not sure. You can ask him.” “Has he ever seen a real shark?” “I believe he’s seen one at the aquarium.” She nodded slowly. “That counts.” Every night that week, she asked me another question about him. What color is his car? Does he have a dog? Does he know how to do a cartwheel? Is he a grown-up or a really big kid? On Saturday morning, she picked out her own dress. The blue sundress with the white daisies. She made me do her hair in two braids, and she sat still for a full half hour while I did it, which never happens. “I want to look nice for the Gift Friend,” she said. She drew him a new picture. It was a house with three people standing in front of it. One tall. One medium. One small. They were all holding hands. I had to go into the bathroom for a minute after she showed it to me. I made spaghetti and meatballs, because that’s Lucy’s favorite, and garlic bread, and a salad nobody would eat. At 5:58, the doorbell rang. I opened the door. Stephen was standing on the porch in a blue button-down shirt, freshly shaved, holding the silver-wrapped present with the purple ribbon. He looked nervous. He looked happy. “Hi,” he said. “Hi.” He leaned down and kissed my cheek. He smelled like his aftershave and the outside air. “Where’s the boss?” he whispered. “She’s coming.” He stepped into the hallway, smiling. Then Lucy came running around the corner. And he dropped the box. So there I was in my own front hallway, with the spaghetti sauce bubbling on the stove and my daughter’s picture of three people holding hands sitting on the kitchen table, watching the man I loved lean against my wall like he was about to pass out. He had gone so pale I honestly thought he might faint. His hand was pressed flat against the wall. His other hand was over his mouth. “Who’s her father?” he asked. I stared at him. “You know I’m divorced. I’ve told you about Mark.” “I know. I know.” His voice was shaking. “What’s his name? His whole name?” “Mark Ellison. Why?” “Can I see a picture of him?” “Stephen, explain yourself. Right now. What’s going on?” “Please.” His voice broke on the word. “Please, Claire. Just show me.” He sounded so broken that I didn’t argue anymore. I pulled out my phone and scrolled through my photos until I found one from Lucy’s third birthday party. Mark holding Lucy in his arms. Both of them wearing paper party hats. Lucy with frosting all over her face, laughing. I held it out. Stephen took the phone. His hands were trembling. He studied the picture for a long time. Several seconds. Longer. “That’s not him,” he said. “Not who?” He didn’t answer. He looked toward the living room. Lucy was sitting at her little coloring table by the window, swinging her legs, singing a song to herself about a frog. “I need to show you something,” he said. He handed my phone back to me. Then he pulled out his own. He scrolled through it with trembling fingers. It took him a long time. Like he was looking for something buried deep. Something he didn’t look at very often. Finally, he stopped. He held it out. The picture showed two young men standing next to a fishing boat on a dock. Sunny day. Lake in the background. Both of them grinning, sunburned, holding up a big fish between them. One of them was clearly Stephen. He looked much younger. Early twenties, maybe. Skinnier. His hair was longer. The other one had dark hair, a little wild, curling at his ears. He had gray-green eyes. An easy smile, a little crooked. And a small notch at the very top of his left ear, like somebody had taken a tiny bite out of it. I knew that face. The kitchen suddenly seemed way too warm. Like somebody had turned on the oven with the door open. “How do you know him?” I asked. My voice came out very small. Stephen looked at me. “It’s my brother,” he said. “Nathan.” I reached out and gripped the edge of the hall table. I needed to hold on to something. Stephen watched my face change. I don’t know what he saw there. But I know he saw something. “You recognize him,” he said. I wanted to say no. It would have been so easy to lie. Just for one more minute. Just long enough to think. Long enough to figure out what this meant. No. I don’t know him. Who’s that? Never seen him before. Instead, I whispered, “I knew him. A long time ago.” Stephen closed his eyes. He stood there with his back against my wall, his eyes squeezed shut, for a very long time. “Nathan died three years ago,” he said finally. “I told you that. The car accident.” “I didn’t know his name,” I whispered. “You never said his name.” “Lucy looks exactly like him.” He opened his eyes. They were wet. “Exactly, Claire. The eyes. The shape of her face. Even the way she tilts her head when she smiles. Nathan used to do that. Exactly like that. When she came around that corner, it was like…” He couldn’t finish. He took a step back from me. Toward the door. “Did you and Nathan have a relationship?” I couldn’t answer. My mouth wouldn’t work. “Please,” Stephen said softly. “Don’t make me ask twice.” “Yes,” I said. He covered his mouth with his hand. When he spoke again, his voice was barely a whisper. “How old is Lucy?” “Four.” “And when is her birthday?” I told him. March twelfth. I watched him do the math. I watched his lips move slightly. Counting backward. Nine months. Ten. The way I had done it myself, a hundred times, alone in the middle of the night, sitting by her crib. He shook his head slowly. “I can’t do this,” he said. “Stephen, wait.” “I need to leave.” “What about dinner? What about Lucy? She’s been waiting all week. She drew you a picture.” He looked genuinely sick. Like he might throw up right there on my hallway floor. “I’s sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have come.” He picked up his keys from the hall table where he had set them down. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at the living room. He walked out the front door. He left the silver-wrapped present lying on the floor against the baseboard, with its purple ribbon still perfectly tied. I stood in the hallway and listened to his car start. I listened to it back out of the driveway. I listened to it drive away down the street until I couldn’t hear it anymore. Then Lucy appeared in the doorway to the living room. She was holding her new picture. The house with the three people holding hands. “Mommy?” she said. “Did my new friend go home?” I knelt down beside her. I was fighting so hard not to cry that my throat hurt. “Yes, honey.” She looked at the front door. “Was it because of me?” “No,” I said. I pulled her into my arms. “No, baby. No. You did nothing wrong. Nothing at all.” She looked over my shoulder at the silver box on the floor. “Can he come back another day?” she asked. I held her and rocked her and didn’t say anything. Because I didn’t have an answer. We ate spaghetti together at the kitchen table. Just the two of us. Lucy ate three meatballs and talked about the frog song. She put her picture of the three people on the empty chair where Stephen was supposed to sit. “So he can see it next time,” she said. After dinner, I let her open the present. I didn’t know what else to do with it. Inside was a set of watercolor paints. The good kind, in a little metal tin, with twenty-four colors and three real brushes with wooden handles. And a pad of thick white paper. There was a card taped to the top. In Stephen’s neat handwriting. For Lucy. I’ve seen your pictures on my refrigerator. You’re a real artist. Can’t wait to see what you make. — Stephen (the Gift Friend) Lucy painted a purple cat that night before bed. She asked me if she could give it to him. “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe someday.” After she fell asleep, I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the dishwasher and let myself think about Nathan for the first time in a long time. Five years earlier, my marriage to Mark had been falling apart. We had been married three years then. We had gotten married young, too young, maybe, and somewhere along the way we had stopped talking. He worked late. I worked late. We would eat dinner in front of the TV without saying a word. We would go to bed at different times. One night, in October, I asked him what was wrong. He sat on the edge of the bed with his back to me for a long time. “I don’t know, Claire,” he said finally. “I’m not sure I love you anymore.” I didn’t cry. That’s what I remember most. I just got up, got my suitcase out of the closet, and started packing. He didn’t try to stop me. I moved into Rachel’s spare room that same night. She met me at her front door in her bathrobe with a bottle of wine and two glasses and didn’t ask a single question until I was ready to talk. I lived in that spare room for almost three months. It was a strange, sad, quiet time. I would go to work. I would come home. I would lie on Rachel’s guest bed and stare at the ceiling. Rachel would knock on the door and try to make me eat. Two months in, Rachel told me I was coming to her coworker’s birthday party. “I’m not going to a party, Rach.” “You are. It’s at the Anchor. Downtown. You’re going to put on mascara and a real shirt, and you’re going to sit at a bar, and you’re going to remember that you’re a person.” “I don’t want to remember that I’m a person.” “Tough,” she said. “Mascara. Now.” That’s where I met Nathan. The Anchor was a loud, crowded bar with dark wood and old fishing nets hanging from the ceiling. Rachel’s coworker’s party had taken over a big table in the back. I didn’t know anybody. I sat at the end of the bar with a glass of wine I didn’t want and tried to look like I was having fun. He sat down on the stool next to me about twenty minutes later. “You look like you’d rather be anywhere else,” he said. I looked at him. Dark hair, a little wild. Gray-green eyes. A crooked smile. A little notch at the top of his left ear. “Is it that obvious?” “You’ve been staring at that wine like it insulted your mother.” I laughed. For the first time in two months. His name was Nathan. He had just moved back to town after five years in Michigan. He repaired industrial equipment. Big machines at factories and plants. He said his family lived nearby, about an hour north, but he wasn’t ready to move back home with them. “I’m thirty years old,” he said. “If I move back into my old bedroom, my mother will start doing my laundry and my life will be over.” We talked for three hours. We talked until the bartender started flipping the chairs up onto the tables. At the end of the night, he asked for my number. I hesitated. “I should tell you,” I said. “I’m still married. Technically. We’re separated.” He nodded slowly. “Okay.” “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m not ready to promise anybody anything.” “I’m not asking for promises,” he said. “I’m asking for a phone number. So I can maybe buy you a cup of coffee sometime that you’ll actually drink.” I gave it to him. Over the next several weeks, we went out a handful of times. Coffee at a little place by the river. A walk through the botanical gardens on a cold Saturday. Dinner at a terrible diner where he ordered pancakes at seven o’clock at night and made me split them with him. He made me laugh. He listened. He never pushed. He talked about his family a little. A brother he was close to, two years older. Parents who had been married forty years. “My mom bakes bread every morning,” he said. “Every single morning. Even though it’s just her and my dad now. They give most of it to the neighbors. The whole street smells like her kitchen.” He had a cat. A big orange tabby named Moose who was, according to Nathan, “about fifteen pounds of pure attitude.” “You’ll have to meet him sometime,” he said. “He bites. But only people he likes.” I never met the cat. I never met his family. He knew I was still legally married. I knew I wasn’t ready to promise anybody a future. Neither of us pretended otherwise. It was a small, quiet, gentle thing. A light in a dark time. Then, at the end of December, Mark called me. “Can we meet?” he asked. “Just to talk?” We met at a coffee shop halfway between his apartment and Rachel’s house. He looked tired. Thinner. He had let his beard grow out. “I started seeing a counselor,” he said. “Back in November. By myself.” I stared at him. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” he said. “About what I said that night. About us. I think I was depressed, Claire. I think I’d been depressed for a long time and didn’t know it. And I took it out on you.” He looked down at his coffee. “I want another chance. If you’ll give me one.” We talked for four hours that day. For the first time in months, maybe years, he seemed willing to actually hear what I was saying. I told Nathan two days later. We were sitting in his truck outside Rachel’s house. It was snowing. The windshield wipers were going. “I’m going to try to save my marriage,” I said. He was quiet for a long time. The wipers went back and forth. “Okay,” he said finally. “I’m sorry.” “Don’t be.” He looked out at the snow. He was disappointed. I could see it. But he didn’t argue. “You told me from the beginning. You were always honest with me. That’s more than most people get.” He turned and looked at me. “I hope you find what you’re looking for, Claire,” he said. “I really do.” I got out of the truck. I walked up Rachel’s front steps. I turned around at the door. He was still sitting there in the truck with the wipers going. He lifted one hand off the steering wheel and waved. That was the last time I ever saw him. A few weeks later, in January, Mark and I moved back in together. Not long after that, in early February, I found out I was pregnant. Mark was over the moon. He cried when I showed him the test. He picked me up and spun me around the kitchen. He called his mother right then, at eleven o’clock at night, and she screamed so loud I could hear it across the room. I never told Mark about Nathan. I had told him, back when we reconciled, that I had gone on a few dates while we were apart. He had nodded and said he understood. He had said he didn’t need to know the details. I never gave him a name. We had been separated, I told myself. Whatever happened during those weeks belonged to the past. It was over. It didn’t matter anymore. I thought our little family had finally found its way. And there was something else I had never told anybody. Not Mark. Not Rachel. Not my mother. Not anybody. I’d wondered. From the very beginning, I had wondered. Mark has brown eyes. Dark brown, almost black. Mine are blue. Lucy’s eyes, when she was born, were that newborn slate gray that all babies have. But by the time she was six months old, they had turned into something else. A strange, beautiful color. Gray-green. Like the lake in winter. I knew eye color wasn’t as simple as people think. I had looked it up. Late at night, on my phone, with Lucy asleep on my chest. I knew that two people could have a child with eyes completely different from either of them. I knew it didn’t prove anything. But the question crossed my mind. More than once. And the dates overlapped. I knew that too. Mark and I had gotten back together right around the time I had last been seeing Nathan. Within a week or two. I could do the math, the same way Stephen had done it standing in my hallway. I could have found out. I could have done a test, quietly, any time in the last four years. I never did. I told myself it didn’t matter. Mark was her father. Mark had been there for every bottle and every diaper and every ear infection. Mark had walked the floor with her for three hours one night when she had colic. Asking the question felt like betraying him. So I put it in a box in the back of my mind and I closed the lid. And I left it there for four years. And then Stephen walked into my hallway and opened it. Stephen didn’t answer my calls that night. I called four times. I texted twice. Please call me. Please. We need to talk. Nothing. I didn’t sleep. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, the way I used to in Rachel’s spare room. Around three in the morning, I got up and went into Lucy’s room and sat in the rocking chair beside her bed and watched her sleep. She was curled up on her side with her stuffed giraffe. The one Stephen had sent her. Her braids had come half undone. Her mouth was open a little. I looked at her face in the glow of her night light. The shape of it. The little point of her chin. The way her eyebrows went up at the ends. I had always thought she looked like me. Now I could only see Nathan. The next morning, at 7:14, my phone buzzed. One message from Stephen. We need to talk. But not in front of Lucy. We met that afternoon in a quiet park near my office while Lucy was at preschool. It was a small park with a pond and a few benches and a family of ducks that everybody fed bread to even though there were signs telling you not to. I got there first. I sat on a bench by the water and watched the ducks. Stephen came about ten minutes later. He sat down on the far end of the bench. As far away from me as he could get without falling off. He had dark circles under his eyes. He hadn’t shaved. He was wearing the same blue shirt from the night before, wrinkled now. For a long time, neither of us said anything. “I owe you an apology,” he said finally. “For walking out like that.” “You frightened her,” I said quietly. He flinched. “I know. I’m ashamed of that. I’ll be ashamed of that for a long time.” “She asked if it was her fault.” He put his face in his hands. “God, Claire. I’m so sorry.” When he looked up again, I asked him the question I had been asking myself all night. “How did you know? How did you recognize Nathan in her? Just like that? In two seconds?” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He opened it. He took out a small, worn photograph. It had been folded and unfolded so many times that there was a white crease right down the middle. He held it out to me. It was a little boy. About five years old. Sitting on a kitchen counter with a big slice of birthday cake in front of him. He had dark curly hair and gray-green eyes, and he was laughing so hard his eyes were squeezed shut. His front tooth was missing. And he had his head tilted just slightly to one side. Exactly the way Lucy does when she laughs. My throat closed up. “That’s Nathan,” Stephen said. “His fifth birthday. My mom has about four hundred copies of this picture. It’s on her refrigerator. It’s on her nightstand. It’s at the bakery. I’ve been looking at it my whole life.” He took the picture back gently. “When Lucy came around that corner,” he said, “it was like he walked into the room.” I stared at the ducks for a long time. “Nathan and I were close,” Stephen said. “Really close. He was two years younger than me, but we did everything together. Fishing. Baseball. We built a treehouse in the backyard that was so dangerous my dad made us tear it down.” He almost smiled. “He used to follow me everywhere. Drove me crazy. I’d give anything for him to drive me crazy one more time.” “What happened to him?” I asked softly. Stephen studied his hands. “He was coming home from work. A late repair job at a plant out in the county. It was about eleven o’clock at night, on one of those two-lane country roads. A driver crossed the center line.” He swallowed. “The other guy had been drinking. He walked away with a broken arm. Nathan died at the scene.” “I’m so sorry, Stephen.” “Thank you.” He was quiet for a moment. “I was just starting to feel normal again when I met you. Rachel set us up, and I almost said no. I didn’t think I was ready for anything. But I went. And you told me about Lucy before we had even ordered, and you talked about her like she was the sun.” He shook his head. “And I thought, maybe. Maybe I can do this. Maybe I can have something good again.” He took a long breath. “Nathan didn’t tell me everything about his dating life,” he said. “We were close, but he was private about that stuff. But I remember. About five years ago, right before Christmas, we were out fishing on the lake. Freezing cold. And he was quiet the whole time. Wasn’t like him. And I asked him what was wrong.” I knew what he was going to say before he said it. “He said there was a woman he really liked,” Stephen said. “He said she was going back to her husband. He said he thought it was the right thing for her, but it still kind of sucked.” I felt heat rise in my cheeks. My eyes stung. “That was me,” I whispered. Stephen nodded slowly. “I figured,” he said. “When you said you knew him. And when I did the math on Lucy’s birthday.” He looked out at the pond. “And then I saw her face.” “Stephen,” I said. “We don’t even know for sure that Nathan is her father.” “Exactly,” he said. “That’s exactly it. We don’t know. And that’s why I can’t keep pretending we’re a normal couple while we figure it out.” I reached across the bench for his hand. He moved it away. Gently. But he moved it away. That hurt more than anything else that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. “I care about you, Claire,” he said. “I need you to know that. I meant every word I ever said to you. About the future. About building something. All of it. I wasn’t lying.” “Then why—” “Because if she’s Nathan’s daughter,” he said, “then she’s my niece.” The words sat there between us on the bench. My niece. “And if she isn’t?” I asked. He stared at the pond for a long time. A duck swam up to the edge of the water, looking for bread. Neither of us had any. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I honestly don’t know. Right now I look at you and I think about my brother. I think about him sitting in that boat, saying she’s going back to her husband. And then I think about you, sitting across
