“How old are they?” I asked.
“Three years and eight months.”
The timing settled over me like cold rain.
Rachel sat at the edge of the bench. She kept her eyes on the children, not on me. “I found out I was pregnant six weeks after you left for Chicago.”
“I didn’t leave you,” I said. “You told me not to come back.”
Her head turned sharply. “What?”
“You wrote me a letter. You said you had met someone else. You said what we had was too complicated, that you needed a clean start.”
Her face emptied.
“No,” she said.
I took the envelope from my coat pocket. “Then what is this?”
She stared at it for a long moment before reaching into the diaper bag with shaking fingers. From an inner pocket, she pulled out another folded paper, protected inside a plastic sleeve. “This is what I got.”
