She told us everything, sitting at that same dinner table, the untouched pie slowly losing its warmth between us.
She’d followed Harlan’s car on her bike, staying far enough back that he never noticed her, watching him drive the same twenty-minute route south she and I had both clocked separately over the past few weeks.
He’d pulled into a facility called Ferncrest Care Center, a long, low brick building with a discreet sign near the entrance, the kind of place that specialized, according to a plaque near the door Nadia had read while locking up her bike, in long-term neurological rehabilitation.
“I followed him inside,” she said. “Nobody stopped me, since visiting hours were still technically open. I found him in a room on the second floor.”
“There was a man in a wheelchair,” she continued. “Younger than Harlan. Older than me, but not by that much. Harlan sat down right next to him and started talking, really gently, the way you’d talk to someone who needed you to slow down and be patient. He held the guy’s hand the whole time. He called him ‘son.'”
My mother’s face went through several emotions in quick succession — confusion, something close to fear, and finally, as the pieces started rearranging themselves, something that looked considerably more like heartbreak than anger.
“Harlan has a son,” she said slowly.
“His name’s Miles,” Nadia said. “I heard a nurse say it when she came in to check on him. Grandma, he can barely talk. He kept trying to say something back to Harlan, and it just wouldn’t come out right, and Harlan just… waited. He didn’t rush him at all. He just kept holding his hand until Miles got the word out.”
