PART 7
“Who is that,” my mother asked, though something in her voice suggested she’d already started putting together an answer she didn’t want to be true.
“That’s Marcus,” I said. “Eli’s biological father. He was a Marine. He was killed in action when Eli was two years old, during his third deployment.”
My mother’s hand tightened around the doorframe.
“You never told me that,” she said. “Three years ago, at that dinner, you never once mentioned—”
“You never asked,” I said, not unkindly, but without softening it either. “You decided Marisol ‘came with baggage’ about ten minutes into meeting her, Mom. You never once asked why she was raising Eli alone, or what actually happened to his father, or anything else that might have complicated the version of her you’d already decided to believe.”
PART 8
Marisol came into the hallway then, drawn by the sound of voices, and stopped a few feet away, her expression carefully neutral in a way I recognized as her bracing herself for whatever came next.
“Mrs. Hargrove,” she said. “It’s been a long time.”
My mother turned to look at her, something visibly cracking open in her composed expression, three years of assumptions apparently collapsing all at once in the space of about ninety seconds.
“You were a war widow,” my mother said slowly. “Raising a two-year-old alone. Working nights. And I stood in a restaurant and called you baggage.”
“You did,” Marisol said, steady, not cruel about it, simply stating a fact neither of them could undo. “I remember every word of it, actually. I’ve had three years to think about that dinner more than I probably should have.”
