What if Simone looked at her granddaughter’s photograph on the mantel and suddenly saw a chapter she hadn’t been told about, a version of her son that included a girl she’d never met and a decision made in a car after graduation?
What if she decided the baby was proof that Callum hadn’t been who she thought he was?
So my daughter thanked her for the tea.
She said something vague about knowing Callum from school.
And she left.
She never told me. She never told her school counselor. She never told Callum’s two best friends, who came to her baby shower without ever asking who the father was, because by then everyone assumed it was simpler not to ask.
She decided she’d raise her son and explain everything later, when he was old enough, when the timing felt less impossible.
She died having him three weeks after that conversation with Simone, from complications no one saw coming, and the explanation she’d been planning to give never got made.
I stopped reading the transcript.
My hands were shaking too hard to hold the paper.
The woman across from me in the school parking lot was crying.
“My name is Simone,” she said. “I think you might already know that, if you’ve gotten this far.”
