He said he had signed the necessary paperwork because I could barely stay conscious.
I never saw the baby.
Never held him.
Never attended a funeral.
Adrian told me it would be better if I did not see him because he had been so premature and there had been complications.
At thirty-one years old, exhausted, medicated and devastated, I believed my husband.
Why wouldn’t I?
For years afterward, I dreamed about the baby.
I called him Samuel privately.
Adrian never wanted to give him a name.
“He was only here for minutes,” he once said.
That sentence had hurt so much I stopped bringing it up.
Now, eight years later, a boy named Lucas Hayes was sitting twenty feet from me with Noah’s face.
My face.
Adrian’s ears.
And the birthmark.
I saw it when Lucas turned his head.
A small reddish mark just below his left ear.
