The headlights were my daughter Nell, bringing back the roasting pan. She sat on the floor beside me and we looked at it together. I wrote to the box in Bangor. Adelaide answered in three weeks. She is eighty one, and the baby in that photograph was her son Theodore, born the year before I met Warren, given up because she was nineteen and her father drove her to the agency himself. Warren had not known until Theodore found him in 1988. He sent what he could, twice a year, for the rest of his life. Adelaide had asked him never to tell me, and he kept that promise the way he kept everything, quietly and completely.
Theodore is sixty two and lives in Bangor and has Warren’s exact hands. He came at Christmas. Nell showed him the workshop.
I was not betrayed. I was married to a man carrying something too heavy to set down. What I felt, finally, was not anger but recognition, and I would rather see him whole than have never seen him at all.
