message saying you were pregnant. I thought—”
“You thought I invented four children?” I asked.
“No. Back then I thought you invented one.”
Celeste’s eyes closed briefly.
Harold stepped forward. “Marcus.”
His tone held a warning.
I turned toward Harold. Something in his face made a cold thread pull through me. “What do you know?”
He looked at Patricia.
Patricia wouldn’t meet my eyes.
My heartbeat changed.
Eight years of carefully sealed pain shifted beneath my ribs. I had come prepared for Marcus’s shock, for embarrassment, for apologies that came too late, for questions my children deserved answers to. I had not come prepared for the feeling that the story I knew might not be complete.
“Patricia,” I said.
She looked older now. Not because of wrinkles or gray hair, but because guilt has a way of aging the eyes before the face.
“I thought I was protecting him,” she whispered.
Celeste stepped back as if she needed distance from all of us.
Marcus stared at his mother. “Protecting me from what?”
Patricia’s hands shook. “From making the same mistake twice.”
“Twice?” I asked.
Harold said her name again, softer this time, but she lifted a hand to stop him.
“No. It’s Christmas. And those children are in my house, and they should have been in my life. No more pretending.”
The fire snapped in the hearth.
Patricia looked at me then, truly looked at me, and for one brief moment I saw not the proud woman who had ignored my calls, not the mother-in-law who had once corrected how I folded napkins and pronounced French desserts, but someone frightened by her own choices.
“You sent a packet,” she said. “A medical packet. Ultrasound, doctor’s note, something from your attorney. It came here because Marcus had moved back home for a few weeks after you separated.”
My mouth went dry.
“I never saw it,” Marcus said.
“No,” Patricia whispered. “You didn’t.”
