“Who is he,” I asked, my voice hardly more than air.
I looked back at the photo and then at the woman I had once believed fate would never let me forget. I remembered doctor visits, printed reports, and the quiet ache of closed doors. We had lived with words like unlikely and never. We had built a future that faltered because it had been balanced on those words.
“You were told you could not have children,” I said, careful and slow.
She nodded. “That part did not change.” She lifted her eyes to mine. “What changed is what I decided to do with the life that was still mine to live. I adopted him.”
The room fell into a soft hush, like a chapel after the last hymn. Althea told me how, after our separation, she visited a children’s shelter in Tlaquepaque to deliver donated books. A boy sat in a corner with a broken pencil, drawing houses and trees. He looked up.
She saw a loneliness that matched her own. She asked his name. Daniel, he said. She kept it, not because it was easy, but because it was already his, and because it was the name we once dreamed for a child we never had.
I turned back to the photo. The child’s smile reached up and steadied something in me. “He looks a little like me,” I said, surprised by the softness in my own voice.
