“Who is he,” I asked, my voice hardly more than air.
“That is Daniel,” she said, and her hands trembled around a mug she had not yet sipped.
“You were told you could not have children,” I said, careful and slow.
She nodded. “That part did not change.” She lifted her eyes to mine. “What changed is what I decided to do with the life that was still mine to live. I adopted him.”
The room fell into a soft hush, like a chapel after the last hymn. Althea told me how, after our separation, she visited a children’s shelter in Tlaquepaque to deliver donated books. A boy sat in a corner with a broken pencil, drawing houses and trees. He looked up.
She saw a loneliness that matched her own. She asked his name. Daniel, he said. She kept it, not because it was easy, but because it was already his, and because it was the name we once dreamed for a child we never had.
I turned back to the photo. The child’s smile reached up and steadied something in me. “He looks a little like me,” I said, surprised by the softness in my own voice.
“I know,” she answered, with a brave half laugh. “That is part of why it took me so long to tell you. Every time he smiled, I saw a piece of you too.”
Outside, the rain traced the window. Inside, we faced the only thing that could help us now, which was the truth spoken gently.
“Why did you not tell me sooner,” I asked.
