I should have felt satisfaction.
I did not.
I felt grief, widening into something too large for the small consultation room.
Because if Melinda was telling the truth, this was not only betrayal. It was not only adultery, not only divorce, not only friendship destroyed.
It was the theft of a possible child.
And the child was here now, breathing softly against the shoulder of the woman who had helped take him from me.
The human heart, I thought, was not designed for contradictions this sharp.
“What is his name?” I asked.
The question surprised everyone, including me.
Melinda looked down at the baby.
“Elliot,” she whispered.
Elliot.
A gentle name.
A name Connor would never have chosen on his own. He preferred names that sounded like surnames, names that belonged on office doors and engraved watches. I wondered if Melinda had fought for Elliot. I wondered if she had named him in some private act of softness, some attempt to make one decent choice inside a thousand wrong ones.
