“Room 114,” she said, lowering her voice. “Down the hallway, on your left. You didn’t hear it from me.”
“Thank you.”
I walked away before she could change her mind.
“Room 114,”
My legs felt strange and heavy beneath me.
Every step took me closer to something I wasn’t sure I could survive.
Room 114.
I stopped in front of the door and pressed my palm flat against the wood.
Voices leaked through the thin walls, low and serious.
I recognized my mother’s voice immediately.
Every step took me closer to something I wasn’t sure I could survive.
Then Logan’s voice, calm but strained.
“We’ve been searching for almost a year now. She can’t know how many dead ends we’ve hit.”
“She deserves to know, Logan,” my mother said. “I keep telling you. She’s stronger than you think.”
“And what if this lead goes nowhere too? What if we tell her and it breaks her all over again?”
I stood frozen, my hand still on the door.
“She deserves to know, Logan,”
Nothing about this made sense.
Not the way my mother sounded.
Not the way Logan spoke.
What had they been searching for, and why?
I reached for the handle and pushed.
The door swung open.
What had they been searching for, and why?
Three heads turned toward me at once.
Logan.
My mother.
And a stranger in a wrinkled gray jacket.
He was holding a folder open across the small table between them.
Papers were spread everywhere.
And a stranger in a wrinkled gray jacket.
Medical charts.
Photographs.
Something that looked like Noah’s adoption records.
I went pale.
“What is this?” I whispered.
Logan stood up so fast his chair scraped against the floor.
“What is this?”
“Honey. Please. Let me explain.”
“What is this?” I said again, louder. “What are you doing here with my mother? With him?”
The stranger cleared his throat and slowly closed the folder.
“Perhaps I should step outside.”
“No,” I said. “You stay. All three of you stay. Because I want to hear this from every single one of you.”
“What are you doing here with my mother?”
My mother rose from her seat, her eyes wet.
“Sweetheart. Sit down. Please.”
“I’m not sitting down until someone tells me why my son saw his father entering a motel with his grandmother. Do you have any idea what he thought? What I thought?”
Logan stepped closer, his hands raised as if approaching something wounded.
“He’s an investigator. His name is Mr. Hollis. We hired him six months ago.”
“I’m not sitting down.”
“An investigator,” I repeated. My voice sounded far away, like it belonged to someone else. “Investigating what?”
“Noah’s biological family.”
The words hit me somewhere deep and hollow.
I looked at the papers on the table.
Noah’s most recent test results were there.
The ones from the specialist we saw last month.
“Investigating what?”
“The doctor said we had time,” I said slowly. “He said we had months before we needed to make any decisions.”
Logan’s face crumpled.
“He was wrong. Or he softened it for us. Either way, we don’t have months. And a donor from Noah’s biological family is our best chance.”
“So you decided,” I said, “the two of you, that I couldn’t handle it.”
“He was wrong. Or he softened it for us.”
“We were trying to protect you,” my mother whispered.
“By lying to me?”
“By carrying it until we had something real to tell you.”
I looked at this woman who had raised me alone.
Who I trusted more than anyone else in the world.
And I felt something crack open inside my chest that I didn’t know how to close.
