“Thank you,” I said.
I smiled.
It fit so perfectly into the muscle memory of our friendship that for about four seconds I almost forgot every word of the phone call.
Almost.
We walked to a baby boutique on Oak Street that she had been excited about. She had mentioned it the week before. I had written the name down because I was playing my part carefully enough to remember things a friend would remember.
Inside, the store smelled like cedar shelves and expensive laundry soap. Tiny socks were arranged in soft towers. A display of onesies sat beneath a framed print of Lake Michigan in summer. Rebecca moved through the racks with both hands resting at the curve of her belly, glowing in the specific, round-faced, loose-limbed contentment of a woman late in pregnancy.
She picked up tiny onesies and held them against herself.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Cream or sage?”
“Sage,” I said. “It looks softer.”
She smiled, pleased.
I stood beside her and told her she was glowing.
I asked about names.
I nodded in the right places.
I meant none of it.
She noticed none of it.
I thought about the recording the entire time.
I thought about the sentence, “I just don’t want my baby growing up confused about who his real family is.”
I thought about what that meant for the baby, who was real and blameless and headed into a situation that was not his fault in any direction.
I did not let myself think too long about that part, because that part required more grace than I had available at the moment, and grace would have to come later.
When we hugged goodbye on the sidewalk, the sky was low and pale over the storefronts, and a cab rolled past with its tires cutting through a shallow puddle.
Rebecca squeezed my arm.
“Em, you seem really good lately,” she said. “Really settled.”
“I am,” I said. “I really am.”
She smiled.
She believed me.
I watched her walk away, one hand under her belly, the other lifting her coffee cup to her mouth, and I felt something that was not quite pity and not quite anger and not quite grief, but had elements of all three layered under an absolute calm that surprised me every day during those three weeks.
Where it came from, I was not entirely sure.
Maybe from the car, in the rain, when I had needed to be clear and discovered something in myself that could be clear when it needed to be.
The second week, Richard’s team added one more piece to the file.
The baby.
I had not asked for this information.
Richard had simply noted, in the clinical language of his report, that the timeline of the pregnancy and Daniel’s confirmed movements had created a small but notable discrepancy. He had, with my father’s authorization, requested that a paternity analysis be initiated through a private medical documentation service. Not a legal test yet. Just a preliminary assessment of timelines, dates, and a cross-reference of Rebecca’s medical records obtained through the channels private investigators use when clients have the resources to authorize them.
He laid the summary on the table during the third week’s briefing.
The timeline of the pregnancy was consistent with a conception date that overlapped with a three-week period during which Daniel had been on a business trip to London.
It was also consistent with a man named Thomas Hail, a name that appeared three times in Rebecca’s documented contact history during the same period, associated with hotel records from the same city.
Richard said nothing editorial about this.
He simply laid the documents down and let the data be what it was.
My father looked at the report.
Then he looked at me.
I said nothing.