The boy turned. His eyes went from Ethan to me, then back to Ethan, and the expression on his face was not joy or anger, but desperate caution.
“Hi,” Caleb said.
Ethan stopped a few feet away from him. “Hi,” he answered, and that one small word carried thirteen years of absence, shock, guilt, and hope.
Laura stood near the library doors, thinner than I expected, with a cardigan pulled tight around her shoulders. She gave me an anxious nod, and I returned it because neither of us had a clean place to stand in this story.
Ethan looked at Caleb and swallowed. “This is my wife, Anna.”
Caleb’s eyes moved to me again. I saw him brace himself, as if he expected me to hate him on sight, and something inside me softened in spite of everything.
“Hi, sweetheart,” I said gently. “It’s nice to meet you.”
His shoulders lowered just a little. “Nice to meet you too.”
We went to a diner across the street because Caleb said he liked the fries there. The booth was red vinyl, the menus were sticky, and a waitress with tired eyes refilled our waters three times because none of us knew what to do with our hands.
At first, Caleb answered every question like he was taking a test. Yes, he liked science, yes, he was in robotics club, yes, math was okay, no, he did not like mushrooms, and yes, he had built a small robot once that accidentally knocked over his mother’s lamp.
Ethan laughed at that, a broken, relieved sound, and Caleb looked startled before smiling back. In that moment, I saw the first fragile thread stretch between them.
I expected jealousy to rise in me like poison, but what came instead was grief. Not the same grief as my miscarriages, not the same wound, but something neighboring it, something that understood how unfair it was for love and loss to sit at the same table.
Caleb looked at me halfway through lunch and asked, “Are you mad?”
The whole table went still. Ethan’s face drained of color, and Laura opened her mouth, but I raised a hand slightly because this question was not theirs to answer.
“I’m hurt,” I said carefully. “But I’m not mad at you.”
He stared down at his fries. “I didn’t know about him either until Mom told me.”
“I know,” I said. “None of this is your fault.”
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