My head snapped up.
“How?”
“You whispered.”
“You said you were alone, but you whispered.”
“And I heard a woman’s voice behind you.”
Memory came back.
Tessa had stirred.
She asked, “Everything okay?”
I had closed the bathroom door.
“I knew that night,” she said.
“Why didn’t you say anything at the hospital?”
“Because Owen’s heart rate dropped twice.”
No one had told me that.
Or maybe someone had.
Maybe I was too ashamed and exhausted to hear.
“I thought something might happen to him,” Corinne whispered.
“I was terrified.
And the only thing I could think was that I would not let the first hours of my son’s life become a fight about his father sleeping with someone else.”
“So I held him.
I fed him.
I took the picture.
And when you walked in six hours later carrying flowers…”
“Flowers?”
“Ivory roses.”
Of course I brought roses.
