First Daddy

Priya wouldn't settle that night. Joanna had given up on the crib hours ago and sat with her curled against her side in the guest room they'd been given at Whitlock House, the party's last cars finally pulling away down the long gravel drive.

"The lady wasn't scary," Priya said into the dark, apropos of nothing, the way children processed things three hours after the adults had moved on. "She was nice. She said she used to live here. She said Daddy used to live here too, before he was our daddy."

Joanna went very still.

"What do you mean, before he was our daddy, baby?"

"She said Daddy had a different family first. A first daddy family. And she said to tell you—" Priya frowned, working to retrieve the exact words the way children did, proud of the assignment. "She said to tell you to ask Grandma about 1987."

The date meant nothing to Joanna and everything to the room around her, somehow, the way Whitlock House had always felt one degree too formal, too curated, like a stage set for a family that had rehearsed being normal a little too hard. Reid was thirty-eight. 1987 would have been —

She did the math twice to be sure. 1987 would have been three years before Reid was born.

"Priya, did the lady say her name? Anything at all?"

"She said..." Priya yawned, fighting sleep now that the excitement had drained out of the day and left only a tired little girl. "She said tell your daddy that Caroline says hello. And that Caroline's still waiting."

Joanna held her daughter until she was fully asleep, and then she sat in the dark for a long time with her phone unused in her lap, because there were two things she could do with the name Caroline and the date 1987, and she needed to decide, before morning, whether she trusted her husband enough to hand them to him directly — or whether she needed to know the answer to Augusta's tomorrow before Reid had the chance to shape it for her first.

She chose, in the end, to do both. She texted Reid, asleep in the next room after finally getting the last guests out: Priya says the woman told her to tell you Caroline says hello. And that Caroline is still waiting. Does that mean anything to you?

Three minutes passed. Then Reid appeared in the guest room doorway in the dark, and even before he spoke, the look on his face told Joanna that whatever she had just set in motion could not be undone by morning, or by Augusta's careful tomorrow, or by any version of this family's history that had been told to her at nine years of Christmas dinners.

"Where did she hear that name," Reid said, and his voice was not the voice of a man who didn't recognize it.