Because a few hours later, a doctor I didn’t know told me that my second son hadn’t survived the birth.
There was no baby to hold. There were papers I was too shattered to read. There was Harriet, oddly present, handling everything, telling me it was kinder not to see.
I grieved a son I was told never opened his eyes.
I raised the one I had, Jake, alone, after I finally left Craig.
And that second boy — the one I b*ried in my mind every single year on Jake’s birthday — had been alive the whole time.
He’d grown up fifteen minutes away.
He’d been eating dinner at my table since the boys were six.
His name was Noah.
Chapter 3: The Baby I Was Told I Lost
Jake watched the truth hit me and realized, slowly, that he’d come home braced to accuse me of giving a baby away — and that I hadn’t given anyone away at all.
