Claire spoke first.
“I want to ask you something,” she said.
“And I need you to answer honestly.”
“Yes,” I said.
“If you had known — if Carol hadn’t lied, if Mum had reached you — what would you have done?”
The question landed exactly where she meant it to.
“I would have come back,” I said.
“I would have come back immediately.”
“You don’t know that for certain,” she said.
Not accusing.
Testing.
“No,” I said.
“I was twenty years old.
I can’t promise you what a twenty-year-old would have done.
But I know what I felt.
I know I proposed to your mother before I left.
I know I spent years afterward wondering why she had said no.” I paused.
“And I know that if someone had told me she was carrying my child, nothing on earth would have kept me away.”
