At My Baby Shower He Celebrated Another Woman’s Child Chapter 29
Inside was Iris’s moon-and-stars wind chime.
The bent little star had been repaired. Beside it lay a handwritten letter from Graham.
I didn’t open the letter.
I just took out the wind chime and hung it by the window.
The evening breeze stirred it, and the moon and stars brushed gently together.
The sound was as clear and bright as I had once imagined.
I stood there for a long time, just looking at it.
“Would Iris have liked it?” June asked softly.
“She would have.”
I reached out and touched the smallest star.
“She deserved every beautiful sound in the world.”
As for the letter, I gave it to my lawyer, unopened, to be returned.
The next day, Graham received the package.
The wind chime was gone.
Only the unopened letter remained.
Sitting in the empty nursery, he finally understood what I meant.
Everything that belonged to Iris, I would take with me.
Everything that belonged to his remorse, I wanted none of it.
I went back to work after the first heavy snow fell in Chicago.
Spread out on my desk was the same notebook on child language development I had used in college.
The pages had yellowed. On one of them, I could still see the faint impression of a coffee ring from the day Graham first spoke to me in the library.
For so long, I had thought that was where my love story began.