Chapter 22
“You don’t need me to keep the house perfect,” she said one afternoon.
“I need someone to tell me when I’m pretending.”
She gave me a knowing look.
“You have enough lawyers for that.”
“I don’t trust lawyers to tell me everything.”
“Then learn to trust people who have no reason to protect your money.”
She left two days later to help her sister in Kentucky.
Before she went, she handed me a small package wrapped in brown paper.
Inside was Owen’s knitted hospital cap.
“I thought Corinne took it,” I said.
“She took the blue one. This was the extra.”
I held it carefully.
“Why are you giving it to me?”
“So you remember that being his father is not a title you wear when it suits you.”
I nodded.
“I’m trying.”
“I know.”
It was the first encouragement I had received that did not feel conditional.
Miriam arranged my first visit with Owen on a Sunday morning.
She warned me not to expect anything dramatic.
“He is an infant,” she said. “The goal is familiarity, not a performance.”
Corinne agreed to meet at June Bell’s house outside Asheville.
I drove there alone.
The mountains rose gradually beyond the highway, blue and hazy beneath a clear autumn sky. The farther I went, the less the world resembled the one I had built in Nashville. There were fields, old barns, roadside stands, and houses set back among trees.
June lived in a white cottage with a broad porch and flower boxes beneath the windows.
She met me at the door.
She was in her seventies, with silver hair braided over one shoulder. I remembered her vaguely from my childhood, though I had not seen her since my mother’s funeral.
“You look like your mother when you’re worried,” she said.
The words unsettled me.
“I’m worried often now.”
“That may be good for you.”
She stepped aside.
“Corinne and Owen are in the back room.”
I entered.
The house smelled of cinnamon and woodsmoke. Sunlight lay across the floorboards. In the sitting room, Corinne stood beside a small crib, holding Owen against her shoulder.
He looked bigger than he had in my memory.
That realization hurt.
I had missed days.
Not just appointments or feedings, but the gradual changes that made a child recognizable.
Corinne turned.
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
She wore a cream sweater and dark jeans. Her hair was pulled back, and there were faint shadows beneath her eyes. She looked tired, but calmer than she had sounded in the recording.