“You kept a child from me. Our son! How could you?”
And there it is. The question he posed to me all those years ago, scribbled on the title page of Regretting Belle. Only now it means something different, something unfathomably worse. “You broke my heart,” I reply raggedly, knowing it isn’t enough, knowing there will never be enough words to fix this. “When you left, and then when the story appeared in the Review, I couldn’t believe you’d actually done it.”
“I hadn’t.”
“I didn’t know that then. How could I?”
“So you felt justified in depriving me of my child.” He raked his fingers through his hair, the gesture so familiar it makes my chest hurt. “Christ. He’s forty-two years old. A grown man. And I missed it all.”
I blink at him through a scrim of tears, searching for something else to say. “I’m sorry, Hemi. So incredibly sorry. From the moment Zachary was born—every moment of every day for the last forty-two years—I’ve looked at him and seen your face. The man who promised to love me forever, then disappeared without a word. I told myself a man who could do that . . .” My voice breaks and I gulp back a sob. “You would have come back, Hemi, but you would have resented me for it. Enough to eventually leave us both. It’s one thing to walk out on a grown woman. It’s another to do it to a child. I couldn’t risk that happening to Zachary.”
“That’s who you thought I was? A man who’d turn his back on his own child?”
“I had no idea who you were—or what you would do. As far as I knew, you had betrayed my confidence and gone back on your word. But I would have forgiven all of that. What I couldn’t forgive was you walking out of my life without a word, as if I’d been nothing to you. I’ve seen what happens when a man loses interest in his wife—and what happens to the children when he does.” I close my eyes as a fresh round of tears threatens. “I didn’t know how to trust you again.”
The silence that settles between us is unbearable, as if all our memories together have been swept away, leaving only this terrible new reality. Hemi stands with his shoulders bunched, his face a mix of shadow and sharp angles as he stares at the photo of our son. Finally, he looks up, pinning me with his sharp blue gaze.
“Last night, at the bar, when you said you did what you had to, that you . . . got on with your life. This is what you were talking about. Raising our son. Without me.”
I force myself to meet his eyes, eyes so filled with pain they tear at my heart. “I’m so sorry, Hemi.”
“Did Dickey know?”
I nod. “Zachary has always been you to a T. We fought about it constantly. He thought you should know. I thought it was none of his business. We had it out once and for all after the business with the lunch. We never spoke again.”
“You were so determined to keep him from me that you severed ties with your favorite nephew? Because he thought I deserved to be a part of my son’s life?”
How can I make him understand? What I felt. What I feared. Not just for me but for my children and the life I’d carefully built for them. “I couldn’t let you back into our lives, Hemi. Not like that. Weekends and holidays and every other summer. Splitting the cost of music camp and bumping into one another at recitals. Polite strangers who happen to share a son. And there was Ilese to consider. What would it have meant for her?”
His face goes blank. “Ilese?”
“My daughter. Zachary was two when I adopted her. They grew up as brother and sister, and I let everyone think that’s what they were. Zachary suddenly turning out to have a father would have been awkward.”
“As awkward as me finding out I have a forty-two-year-old son?”
I tell myself I have no right to defend myself, that after what I’ve done I should simply stand here and take whatever he throws at me, but I can’t bear the thought that he thinks any of it was easy for me, that there was a single day while Zachary was growing up that I didn’t question the choices I made.
“That isn’t what I meant, Hemi. By the time I did know how to find you, so much time had passed. It was just the three of us for so long. I was afraid—”
He holds up a hand, cutting me off. “I don’t want your excuses. There are no excuses for this.”
“That isn’t what I’m doing. I’m saying I was wrong. No matter what I believed you’d done, I had no right to keep Zachary from you.” Tears blur my vision, tears I have no right to. “I don’t know how else to say it or what else to do.”
He stands with his arms crossed, legs braced wide, unyielding. “What is it you want?”
I stare at him. “What do I want?”
“What do you see happening? Surely you had some sort of endgame in mind when you asked me to come here. What was it?”
“I wanted to make things right between us. To tell you I know I was wrong. Terribly and unforgivably wrong—and to ask for forgiveness anyway.” I wait for a response, unable to tell if my words have had any impact, but his expression remains blank. “Say something. Please.”
A muscle pulses at his jaw. “What would you like me to say?”
“Anything. I don’t know. Tell me where we go from here.”
“We don’t go anywhere, Marian. Not now.”
I nod, closing my eyes. “Yes. All right. For what it’s worth, Zachary is a concert violinist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and he’s getting married in June.”
“Well then, at least I didn’t miss everything.”
His face, so stony a moment ago, seems to shatter before my eyes, and I feel my heart shatter with it. “I don’t know how many times I can say I’m sorry, Hemi, but I’ll say it as many times as you ask me to. I’ll say it forever.”
He shakes his head, his eyes bleak and hollow. “All these years, I’ve wondered if it could have ended differently. I’d remember how it was between us, all the things we were going to see and do, and think maybe there was a way to get that back. That’s why I showed up last night. To see if there was a chance. And then today, for one mad instant, when I kissed you and you kissed me back, I thought there might be. Now I see that we’ve missed it. Zachary was our chance. After all the what-ifs, all the years apart, he was our way back. We might have salvaged something of the life we’d planned. But not now. And the worst part is this time there’s no one else to blame. The letter, the story—someone else did those things. Saboteurs, you called them. But you did this. You were the saboteur.”
He grabs his coat from the arm of the sofa and heads for the foyer without turning back. I watch him walk away, wishing I knew how to make him stay, but I’ve used up all the words I know for I’m sorry. And he doesn’t want to hear them anyway.
Stillness descends as the front door closes behind him, the echo of nothingness threatening to undo me. So complete. So final. I retrieve the photo of Zachary from the bar where Hemi left it and stare down at our son’s face. His father’s face. I had hoped for closure, but all I feel is the opening of old wounds.
TWENTY-THREE