The only people who could have ended it in an afternoon were the two people who swore, for thirty-one years, that they knew nothing.
Chapter 4: The Kitchen Table, Again
Nathan wanted to meet his grandparents. Not for a reunion. For an answer.
My parents are old now. We went together, my son and I, and we sat at the same kitchen table where they’d once laid adoption papers in front of a sobbing eighteen-year-old.
I put the truth on the table between us, the way you set down something heavy you’ve carried too far.
“You placed him with the Danvers,” I said. “Forty minutes away. There was no agency. You knew his name. You knew where he grew up. And every time I came to you crying, every lead, every year, you looked at me and said you knew nothing.”
The room went completely silent. My mother’s hand was over her mouth. My father, who had made it all happen with one ultimatum thirty-one years ago, could not look at the grown man sitting beside me — the surgeon, his grandson, wearing the cross.
