PART 5
“You knew where she was,” I said, my voice coming out considerably less steady than I wanted it to. “This whole time. Eighteen years of me hating a woman you were apparently in contact with.”
“I found her,” Mrs. Delacroix said quietly. “Three days after Jasper was born, Foster. I came by with a casserole, the way I did for every new baby on this street back then, and I found Vivian in your bathroom, completely unraveled, saying things that frightened me badly enough that I called an ambulance before I called you.”
I sat there, the sealed letter still on the table between us, trying to reconcile eighteen years of a story I’d built for myself against whatever she was about to tell me instead.
PART 6
“She had postpartum psychosis,” Mrs. Delacroix said. “Severe, and fast-moving, the kind that can develop within days of delivery instead of the weeks or months people usually associate with postpartum depression. I recognized it immediately, from my career, because I’d worked a psychiatric unit for eleven years before I retired. She wasn’t in her right mind at all, Foster. She was terrified she was going to hurt Jasper, having thoughts about it she couldn’t control and didn’t understand, thoughts that horrified her considerably more than they frightened either of us.”
“That’s not what happened,” I said, my voice rising. “She looked at his diagnosis and walked away. She said ‘I can’t do this’ and she meant him, Odile, not some medical crisis nobody ever told me about.”
“She said it because both things were happening at once,” Mrs. Delacroix said. “The diagnosis triggered something in her that had nothing rational left in it by that point. I got her to the hospital that same afternoon. She spent six weeks in an inpatient psychiatric unit afterward, Foster. The divorce paperwork, the signed rights — her psychiatrist told me, years later, that decisions made in the acute phase of that particular crisis often don’t reflect anything close to a person’s actual wishes once they’re stable again.”
