He closed his hand around the cross.
“Because the baby was me,” he said. “I’m Nathan. The Danvers adopted me. And this cross has been around my neck since the day I turned eighteen and they gave me the one thing that came in my blanket from the woman who had me.”
Chapter 3: Both Sides of the Same Wall
My son. On a stranger’s chart that morning, my own name — the name he’d been quietly carrying for years — had appeared on his surgical schedule.
Nathan Danvers. A surgeon. My son was a surgeon.
He told me the rest slowly, over days, while I healed — in part from the surgery, in much larger part from thirty-one years I was finally allowed to set down.
The Danvers had loved him completely. That was the first thing he made sure I knew, and the thing I will be grateful for until I die — that while I grieved, he was safe, wanted, raised by kind people who never hid that he was adopted. When he turned eighteen, they gave him the silver cross and the little they knew: a first name, a birth date, a hospital.
