I took the statement, and I took the folder with the papers, and I walked Marlene to the door, and I thanked her, and she looked at me, and her eyes were full of tears, and she said, "I am sorry, Mr. Langley. I am sorry for all of it. I hope your daughter grows up knowing she is loved, and I hope the other little girl does too."
Then she went down the path and got into her car, and she drove away, and I stood in the doorway and watched her go, and I held the folder in my hands, and I thought about the two signatures at the bottom of the papers, and about the truth, which was coming out now, piece by piece.
Chapter 18
— The Man Who Never Met His Daughter
That night, after the girls were asleep, Elspeth and I sat in the sitting room, and she told me the rest of what she knew about Jared. She had been waiting to tell me, she said, until Marlene had come and gone, until the adoption papers had been seen, until the truth about the baby had been laid out in the open, because the story of Jared was the saddest part of all.
"Jared was Meredith's cousin," she said. "He grew up in Wilmington, not far from our house, and he and Meredith were close when they were children, and they stayed close when they grew up. He was a kind man, Beau, and a gentle one, and he loved Veronica, though none of us understood why, and none of us could stop him."
She told me that Jared and Veronica had been together for a time, before I had ever met Veronica, and that they had loved each other, and that they had made plans, and that the plans had fallen apart, the way plans do, and that they had gone their separate ways. And then, one day, Veronica had come to him and told him she was going to have a baby, and that the baby was his, and Jared had told her that he would stand by her, and that they would raise the baby together.
"He was happy, Beau," Elspeth said. "He called Meredith the night Veronica told him, and he told her everything, and he said he was going to be a father, and that he was frightened, and that he was proud, and that he could not wait to hold his daughter in his arms. Meredith told me about the call, and she said she had never heard him so happy."
The night the baby was born, Jared was on his way to the hospital. He had called Veronica from the road, and he had told her he was coming, and that he would be there soon, and that he loved her, and that he loved the baby. And then, on the road, in the dark, in the rain, his car left the road, and it struck a tree, and he was killed at once, and he never reached the hospital, and he never saw his daughter, and he never held her in his arms.
Elspeth stopped then, and she put her hand over her mouth, and I saw that she was crying, and I reached across the table and took her hand, and we sat in silence for a long time, listening to the rain that had begun to fall outside the window, and I thought about Jared, driving through the rain in the dark, on his way to the hospital, on his way to meet his daughter, and I felt a grief for a man I had never met, a man who had died on the road to his own child.
"Veronica never knew," Elspeth said at last. "She was in the hospital, in labour, and no one told her, because no one knew how to tell her, and because the nurses were busy with the baby, who was small and early and fighting to breathe. She gave birth to her daughter, and she signed the papers, and she left the hospital alone, and she never knew that the man she had loved had died on the road to her, trying to reach his daughter."
I thought about Veronica then, and about the years that had followed, and about the woman she had become, and I thought about the weight she had carried without knowing what it was, the weight of a loss she had never been told about, and I felt something I had not expected to feel for her, something close to pity, though not forgiveness, never forgiveness, not for what she had done to Poppy.
"Did Meredith know?" I asked. "Did Meredith know that Jared had died?"
"Yes," Elspeth said. "She knew. She found out the next morning, from the hospital people, and she kept it to herself, because she did not know who to tell, and because she was afraid of what it would do to Veronica, and because she was grieving for her cousin, and for the baby, and for all of it. She wrote it in her notebook, Beau. She wrote it all down, the way she always did, and she kept it in her desk, and she never told you, because she did not know how."
I went upstairs then, to the small room, and I took the notebook from the desk, and I found the entry, and I read it, and there it was, in Meredith's handwriting, the last piece of the story. "Jared died on the road to the hospital," she had written. "He never met his daughter. Veronica never knew. I do not know what to do with this. I only know that someone must remember him, and that someone must tell his daughter, one day, that her father loved her, and that he was coming for her, and that he never stopped coming."