It was an adoption record.
Noah’s.
And the birth date on it was my son’s birth date.
The exact day. The exact hospital.
The day I had twins — and was told, hours later, that only one of them had lived.
Chapter 2: The Paper
I need to go back eighteen years, because Jake was staring at me waiting for the lie he was so sure was coming, and the truth was worse than anything he’d imagined, and also, somehow, the opposite of what he feared.
Eighteen years ago I was twenty, poor, and in love with a man named Craig whose family had money and a mother named Harriet who looked at me the way you look at something tracked in on a shoe.
I went into labor and delivered two boys.
I remember two cries. I have held onto that detail for eighteen years, and been told, gently and firmly, that I was confused, that I was exhausted, that grief does strange things to memory.
