Cheryl is the woman who called the school, and apparently she has been calling for almost three years because the boy keeps getting moved between schools without the paperwork being completed. I asked my husband who the boy was, and he said he didn’t know any boy. Then I asked why Cheryl would say, “I bring him to the house,” and he stared at the coffee like he’d forgotten I was sitting there. I asked him why the school had his number, why Cheryl knew our address, and why she was talking to him like he was supposed to be responsible for this child. He kept saying there had to be some mistake, but then I asked him why the assistant had mentioned his insurance when she was talking about the boy’s doctor’s appointment, and he went completely quiet.
I told him I wanted to hear the rest of the messages, and he said there wasn’t anything else I needed to know. I asked him why he’d been sending money every month, because the messages made it sound like someone had been paying for the boy’s expenses, and he finally admitted there was an account he’d opened years ago that he said was “for emergencies.” I asked what kind of emergency required a separate account and a woman named Cheryl, and he wouldn’t answer me. Then I asked him why the messages kept mentioning our house, and he finally said the boy had been there before. I said that was impossible because I had never seen him, and my husband looked at me for a long time before saying, “You weren’t supposed to.”
He said the boy’s name was the same name we had picked for our son before I lost the pregnancy in 2004, and that Cheryl had never called him by any other name. I asked him how she could possibly know that name, and he said she couldn’t have known it from him because he’d never told anyone outside our family. Then I remembered the box my mother gave me after the funeral, the one with the hospital paperwork I hadn’t opened in years. I went upstairs and found it exactly where I’d left it, but the envelope inside wasn’t sealed anymore. There was a copy of a birth record I’d never seen before, dated three days after the miscarriage, and under “Father” was my husband’s full name — while under “Mother” was a woman’s name I recognized from one of the messages, and the date beside her name was…
