I stood there staring at the dates until I realized what they meant. 1994 to 1996. Two years, exactly. I called the flower shop from my car and asked when the standing order had first been placed. The woman checked the old account and said it had been opened in 2015, but the original customer information had been transferred from another florist. She gave me the name on that older account. It was my husband’s. Then she said something that made me ask her to repeat it: every Friday, he ordered the same white spray roses and wrote the same message on the card — “For our little girl.” Our daughter was born in 1998.
I drove home and pulled out the baby box I’d kept for twenty-eight years. Her birth certificate, the hospital bracelet, the photographs, everything was there. Except the hospital discharge papers. I had never noticed they were missing. My husband had always handled the paperwork because I’d been recovering from a difficult delivery. Then I found an old photograph taken outside the hospital, dated two days after our daughter was supposedly born. My husband was standing beside the car, holding a baby carrier. But there were two babies in the photograph. One was ours. The other was wrapped in a blanket with the same hospital bracelet I’d always believed belonged to my daughter.
I called the hospital and gave them the name from the cemetery. The woman on the phone went quiet, then asked whether I was sitting down. She told me there had been an infant death in 1996, and my husband’s name appeared in the restricted family section of the record. I asked why he would have been listed when we weren’t married yet. She couldn’t tell me. I went back to the cemetery the next morning and looked more closely at the stone. Beneath the name was a tiny inscription I’d missed: “She was loved before she was lost.” And when I finally turned the photograph over, there was my husband’s handwriting from 1996 — two years before our daughter was born.
