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Part 3
He held her hand through the IV lines. He whispered to her when the machines beeped. He brushed her hair back with the tenderness of someone who had been doing it his whole life.
It unsettled me.
The way he acted like he had the right to love her.
Like he was her son.
When Mom finally slept, I stood.
“Louis. Outside.”
He followed me into the corridor without argument.
“I want you to quit,” I said. “I’ll pay you triple what she’s paying. Tonight. Walk away and don’t come back.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then he turned and walked toward the elevator.
“Louis,” I called, following him. “Answer me.”
He didn’t stop until we were outside in the cold hospital parking lot, fluorescent lights buzzing above us.
Then he turned, pulled the leather notebook from his vest pocket, and held it out.
“She asked me to stay silent,” he said. “But I can’t anymore.”
My chest tightened.
“What did she hide?”
He took a deep breath.
“Sixty years ago, before you were born, your mother had a baby. A boy. She was nineteen, unmarried, and her family would not let her keep him.”
The parking lot seemed to tilt beneath me.
I knew before he said the rest.
“She gave him up for adoption,” Louis said. “Years later, she put her name in an adoption registry, just in case. A year ago, that boy found her.”
The photograph.
The shoulders.
The way Mom looked at him.
“You,” I whispered.
“Me.”
His enormous hands hung at his sides.
“She didn’t want to die without knowing me, Margaret. And she didn’t want to lose you while trying.”
Every wall I had built inside myself collapsed at once.
Later, I opened the notebook and found pages of questions Louis had saved for her.
What songs did she sing when she was young?
Did she love the sea?
What color were her mother’s eyes?
What had he looked like in the few minutes she held him?
By then, I was already running back inside.
Mom was awake, her fragile hand resting on the blanket.
I sank into the chair beside her.
“Why a stranger, Mom?” I asked, my voice breaking. “Why not me? Why couldn’t you tell your own daughter?”
She closed her eyes for a long moment.