“That’s not the same as us getting back together.”
“I know.”
“I need you to actually know it,” Naomi said, “not just say it to make this moment feel better.”
I need you to actually know it, not just say it to make this moment feel better.
“I know it,” I said again, and meant it as fully as I knew how.
I sat with Naomi in that hallway for another hour, past visiting hours technically, until a kind nurse quietly pretended not to notice the clock. We talked more honestly in that single hour than we had in the final eighteen months of our marriage combined — about Harold, about the genetic counselor’s cautious explanations, about the particular loneliness of carrying a secret that big through a marriage already buckling under its own separate weight.
I came back the following week, and the week after that, sitting through pre-op appointments I hadn’t been invited to but wasn’t turned away from either. I met Harold properly for the first time as exactly what he was, not what I’d always assumed he’d been — a quiet, careful man who’d spent thirty-two years loving a daughter from a distance he’d never fully chosen, and who wept, unashamed, the first time Naomi called him “Dad” out loud in front of both of us.
