Two Lines
I didn't get to think about the letter for long, because that same week I found out I was pregnant.
I told Sebastian first, in our room, watching relief and terror cross his face in the same second, which should have warned me more than it did. He held me like I was breakable. "That's — Naomi, that's wonderful," he said, and meant it, I think, even as something darker moved behind his eyes.
"What?" I asked. "What is it?"
"Nothing. It's good news. It's just—" He stopped himself. "We should tell my mother."
We didn't get to choose how. Constance appeared at dinner already knowing, the way she seemed to know everything in that house before it happened, and her reaction wasn't what any new grandmother's should have been.
No tears. No joy. She set down her wine glass very precisely and said, "Then there's no more reason to delay the paperwork. You'll sign tomorrow."
"I haven't decided anything about signing," I said.
"You will decide correctly," Constance said, "now that there's a child involved." She looked at Sebastian, not me. "Explain it to her properly this time."
He didn't explain anything. He barely spoke for the rest of dinner.
I confronted him afterward with the photograph — Imogen, the baby, the fountain, the letter dated nine years too late. His face went the color of the tablecloth.
"You don't understand what this family survived," he said, which wasn't a denial, I noticed. Which was, in its own way, worse than a denial.
"Then tell me. Make me understand."
"I can't." His voice cracked on the second word. "I don't fully understand it myself, Naomi. I was told what I was told. I was raised not to ask more than that."
"Someone in this house knows the truth."
"And you're pregnant with the next person they'll ask to keep it," he said, and then looked horrified he'd said it out loud, like the sentence had escaped him rather than being spoken on purpose.
He wouldn't say another word after that, no matter how I pushed. But he also, for the first time since I'd married him, didn't tell me to stop asking.