Then recordings.
Then, months later, Ava.
I sat upright.
“Ava has been here?”
Melissa nodded.
“Three times.”
That explained everything.
The whisper beneath the oak tree.
The secondhand coat had never been proof of anything.
The secrecy had.
“Why would you involve a seven-year-old before telling me?”
Calvin answered immediately.
“That was my mistake.”
Melissa shook her head.
“It was mine too.”
They had believed seeing Ava might help Melissa connect memories of motherhood with the child she remembered.
And it had.
Melissa remembered Ava’s birth.
She remembered singing while warming bottles at three in the morning.
She remembered a stuffed rabbit with one bent ear.
Ava, meanwhile, had been told the truth gently with help from Havenwood’s family counselor.
Nobody had asked her to keep a frightening secret.
But they had asked her to let Melissa decide when she was ready to see me.
Children, however, understand honesty more simply than adults do.
