I told myself that a child surrounded by love does not need to know every fact of his origins, that I was enough, that the two of us were enough.

And most days I believed it.

I did not know that the answer to his question was not gone at all.

I did not know that it was sitting in a safe deposit box three states away, in the hands of a frightened woman, waiting.

Chapter 6 — The Woman at the Grave

It happened on an ordinary afternoon, the kind of clear cool day when we often went to visit Chloe, at the small cemetery on the edge of town where I had buried her ten years before.

We went regularly, Noah and I.