Chapter 6 - THE MAN WHO SENT HER AWAY
Richard asked who was speaking.
Clara looked at me.
Something terrible passed across her face.
He had heard her voice at dinner.
He still hadn’t learned it.
“The child you sent away,” she said.
He began to cry.
I would have recognized that sound anywhere.
For years, it had made me soften.
Now it made me sick.
“I made a terrible decision.”
“You made more than one,” Clara said.
“You had nineteen years.”
He asked to see us.
Naomi insisted the meeting take place at her office, with a record made by agreement.
Richard arrived the following afternoon without Vivian.
His tie was crooked.
I remembered straightening it before business dinners.
I kept my hands in my lap.
He placed a worn envelope on the table.
Inside was a laboratory report dated three weeks before Clara disappeared.
A paternity test.
The conclusion said he was not her biological father.
I stared at it.
“That’s a lie.”
“Vivian brought it to me,” he said.
I waited.
He looked down.
“She said you’d had an affair.
She said everyone knew.”
“And you asked everyone except your wife.”
“I was humiliated.”
Clara’s chair scraped back.
“You were humiliated?”
Richard flinched.
“She told me you planned to leave,” he said to me.
“That you would take money from the company and disappear with Clara.”
“So you disappeared her first.”
His mouth opened.
Closed.
Vivian had arranged everything, he said.
A temporary separation.
A safe placement.
Time to force a confession from me.
But after the picnic, Vivian told him Clara had been moved farther away.
Then that bringing her back would expose him.
Then that the child had settled with another family.
Every year, the same threat.
Tell the truth, and lose everything.
“You could have lost a house,” I said.
“A company.
Your reputation.”
I pointed toward Clara.
“She lost her mother.”
Richard turned to her.
“I thought you weren’t mine.”
Clara’s eyes shone.
“I was four.”
The sentence stripped the room bare.
Naomi moved the old report into a protective sleeve.
“We’ll verify its source.”
Richard nodded weakly.
Then he looked at me.
“I didn’t know the signature was forged.”
“You watched me search for a child you had sent away.”
He had no answer.
Clara stood.
Before she left, she placed her hands on the table.
“Even if that report had been real,” she said, “you still would have been my dad.”
After the door closed, Richard finally stopped crying.
May you like
He stared at the empty chair.
I hoped he saw it for the rest of his life.
