Chapter 10
— The Unannounced Guest
The morning after I told Veronica to pack her things and leave, I woke before dawn and could not sleep again. Poppy slept in my bed, curled against my side, her breathing slow and even, her small hand resting on my arm. Her head felt light without the weight of her curls. I lay awake in the dark and listened to her breathe, and I thought about the locks I had changed the night before and the wedding that would never happen.
When the first grey light came through the window, I got up carefully, so as not to wake her, and went downstairs to make coffee. Dolores was already in the kitchen, setting out a plate for Poppy and a mug for me. She did not ask how I was. She only said Poppy had slept well, and the house felt different, and different was not the same as wrong. I drank the coffee standing at the counter, because sitting down felt like giving in.
I had calls to make that day. Cancel the rehearsal dinner. Call the florist. Call Oliver Pembroke and ask what came next. Tell Poppy, gently, that the wedding was not going to happen. Being busy was better than sitting still and thinking about the night before.
Poppy came downstairs just after seven, still in her nightdress, rubbing her eyes. She asked if Veronica was coming back, and I told her no, that Veronica had gone to live somewhere else, and that Poppy and I and Dolores would stay here together. She nodded slowly and asked if she could have toast with jam. I said yes, and for a little while the morning felt almost ordinary.
The knock on the front door came a little after eight. It was firm, three sharp raps, the knock of someone who had driven a long way and was not going to turn around without being heard. I wiped my hands on a dish towel and went to the door, expecting the caterer or the florist. I opened it to find a woman I had not seen in more than two years standing on my step with a small bag in her hand and her coat buttoned to the chin against the morning cold.
It was Rosalind, Meredith's best friend, who had stood beside Meredith at our wedding and held Poppy in the hospital on the night she was born. She had not called. She had not written. She had simply driven here, and now she stood in front of me with her face pale and her eyes red, as though she had been crying in the car.
"Beau," she said. "I heard what happened last night. I came as soon as I could."
I did not ask how she had heard. News travels fast in a small town, and the caterer had been in my house when it happened. I stepped back and let her in. She set her bag down by the door and said she had something to tell me, something she should have told me a long time ago, and that she had waited too long already.
"Dolores is with Poppy," I said. "Come into the sitting room."
She followed me in and sat on the edge of the sofa, her hands folded in her lap, her coat still buttoned. I sat across from her and waited. Outside the window the garden was grey in the early light, and the big tree stood bare and still, and somewhere in the kitchen Poppy was laughing at something Dolores had said.
"I am not here about the wedding," she said at last. "The wedding is over, and good riddance. I am here about something older. Something from the night Poppy was born. Beau, there is something about Veronica that you do not know, and I have carried it for six years, and I cannot carry it any longer."
My hands went cold around the mug. I set it down on the table so she would not see them shake.
"Tell me," I said.
She looked toward the kitchen, toward the sound of Poppy's voice, and she lowered her voice and said, "Veronica was in that hospital too. The same night. She gave birth the same night Meredith did, in the room right next door."
The words landed in the quiet room like stones dropped into still water. I stared at her. I thought of Veronica, of the way she had talked about children as though they were a subject she had studied from a distance, and I thought of Meredith, lying in a hospital bed six years ago, holding our daughter.
"That cannot be right," I said. "Veronica never told me she had a child. She never mentioned a baby. Not once."
"I know," Rosalind said. "That is the point. She never told you. But it happened, Beau. I was there. I sat with Meredith in that room, and I heard the baby crying in the next room, and I saw the nurses going back and forth between the two doors. Meredith knew too. And she never told you, because she did not know what it meant."
She stopped then and pressed her hands together, and I saw she was shaking too. In the kitchen Poppy laughed again, and I sat on the sofa in my own sitting room and felt the floor shift under me.