Chapter 5
The paternity test confirmed Nora was my daughter.
I read the result in Ms. Brooks’s office with Rosa beside me.
I had spent the week learning how Nora held a pencil and which stories she liked. The report did not create my feelings for her. It gave her an answer she had been asking me to say aloud.
“May I tell her?” I asked Rosa.
“She’d want to hear it from you.”
We went to her house together.
Nora was at the kitchen table helping Ivy draw a family of rabbits. She looked up when I came in.
“Did you remember?”
“I wrote it down.”
I sat beside her.
“We got the test result. I’m your father.”
She did not smile at first.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Will you stay my father?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes filled.
“Even if I get scared?”
“Especially then.”
She leaned into me. Ivy put down her crayon and wrapped her arms around both of us. Rosa turned toward the sink, but I saw her wipe her face.
Later, while the girls played, Rosa gave me a box of Grace’s things. It held photographs, copies of messages, and a notebook where Grace wrote about Nora growing up.
I asked Rosa if I could take it home to read.
“She wanted you to have it,” she said.
That night, I sat in my study and opened the notebook.
Grace wrote that Nora loved birds and hated carrots. She wrote that Nora asked why some children had fathers at school concerts and she did not. On one page, Grace had copied a letter she planned to send me.
I do not want money from you, she had written. I want you to know her. She deserves the chance to know you.
The letter was dated four years earlier.
I checked the address. It was my office.
Vanessa had not been the only person who could have intercepted mail there. I ran my own construction company. My assistant received letters for me; my former business partner had access to the office too.
I did not want to guess.
The next morning, I asked my assistant, Elaine, to search archived mail logs and copies of any correspondence concerning Grace. She returned with one entry from four years ago.
A certified envelope had been delivered. The log showed it went to my then-partner, Paul, because I was out of town.
Paul had left the company two years later.
“Why would he take my personal letter?” I asked.
Elaine looked uneasy.
“He handled legal correspondence when you traveled. It may have been treated as a claim.”
“Can you find a copy?”
“I’ll try.”
That afternoon, the investigator called. Vanessa had admitted receiving Grace’s letters that summer at our home. She said she first intended to tell me. Then she went to Rosa and brought Nora home herself.
“She says she was afraid you’d leave her and Ivy to build a life with Grace,” he told me.
“Grace had died.”
“She learned that after she began intercepting the letters. She says she felt trapped by what she had already done.”
I thought of Nora behind the wall.
Vanessa’s fear did not put the child there by itself. Vanessa made that choice again each day she kept the panel closed.
I spoke with a family lawyer, Ms. Carter. She helped me understand what I needed to do for both girls while the authorities handled Vanessa’s conduct.
I told her I wanted Nora to stay connected to Rosa. Grace’s mother was the person she knew and trusted.
“That can be part of the plan,” Ms. Carter said. “We’ll move at a pace that serves Nora, not anyone else’s wish to make this simple.”
I was grateful for that.
I also asked about Ivy. She missed her mother, even though she had been frightened by the secret.
“I don’t want to make Ivy choose between loving Vanessa and telling the truth,” I said.
“She shouldn’t have to,” Ms. Carter answered.
That evening, Elaine called me at home.
She had found a scanned copy of Grace’s old letter in Paul’s archived files. Beside it was an email he sent to someone outside our company.
May you like
The recipient was Vanessa.
They had known each other four years earlier, long before she told me Grace’s name was new to her.
