PART 2

“My parents told me that strangers adopted him and took him far away,” I whispered, struggling to push myself upright against the pillows.

The surgeon pulled a vinyl visitor chair close to my bedside, sat down, and looked directly into my eyes with an expression full of shock.

“I was…” He stopped, swallowed, and tried again.

“I was that baby.”

There are moments when the mind protects itself by refusing the plainest meaning of a sentence. I heard him.

I could see his face, his hands, the silver cross resting against his dark blue scrubs.

Yet the words seemed to have been spoken from the far end of a long corridor.

“You’re Tobias?” I asked. “That was the name on the papers my adoptive parents were first given.

They called me Thomas for most of my childhood. I changed it back when I was twenty-one.”

I looked at his eyes. They were gray, like my grandmother’s.

I had rehearsed this moment a thousand times, but never with an IV in my arm and stitches beneath my hospital gown.

“I don’t understand,” I whispered.

“How did you know me?”