Part 6
Grant sought Nora’s eyes, but she gave him no answer to borrow.
He lowered himself from the bench until he was crouched in front of the boy. G.T. didn’t retreat. Up close, there was no mistaking the shape of his face, but Grant had already seen what careless certainty could do.
“I believe I am,” he said. “I’m going to get that settled properly. And I’m going to take care of what I should’ve taken care of before.”
G.T. watched him with a small crease between his brows.
“Daddies go away?”
Grant’s throat tightened. Behind the boy, Nora’s fingers curled against the bench.
“I stayed away too long,” he said. “That was my fault. You’ll always know where to find me.”
G.T. touched the edge of the tag.
Grant slipped the chain over his head and gathered it in his palm before setting it in the boy’s hand.
“You can look after this, if your mom says yes.”
Nora brushed at her cheek, then nodded. The boy closed his fingers over the metal.
Lunch came before any other plans.
They found somewhere warm, and Grant ordered soup and sandwiches, milk for G.T., applesauce, tea for Nora. She held the cup close while the boy ate. He was careful with each bite, catching crumbs with his free hand and looking toward his mother before taking more.
Grant asked whether he wanted another half sandwich.
G.T. nodded, then quickly added, “Please.”
Grant went to the counter himself.
Afterward, he rented a car and obtained a child’s safety seat. Nora started to object to the expense, then sat down again. On the drive toward Merriton, G.T. slept with the tag in his fist and the chain gathered safely away from his neck.
Nora watched the road through the passenger window. Grant didn’t ask her to make conversation.
The house stood partway up a slope beneath bare branches. A sheet of plastic covered a damaged window. On the roof, the edge of a tarp lifted whenever the wind caught it.
Inside, a space heater hummed near Helen’s chair. There was a saucepan on the stove and a row of medicine bottles beyond the sink. The room smelled of damp timber and something starchy kept warm too long.
Helen saw him from the recliner.
Her good hand moved on the blanket. She struggled with his name, shaping the beginning twice before she got it out.
Grant knelt beside her chair.
“I should’ve been here, Mrs. Bellamy.”
Helen raised her hand and rested it on his closely cropped head. Her fingers were stiff, but he recognized the touch. Years earlier, she had done the same thing when he bent to retrieve a fallen box of thread.
At the sink, Nora turned on the tap and stood with her back to them.
That evening, Grant called his command. He explained that he had found a child he believed to be his and a family in immediate difficulty. His leave was extended while he began sorting out what came next.
Leon helped him find an assistance contact. From there came a hospital social worker, legal aid, and a clinic willing to review Helen’s treatment. Grant paid what the pharmacy was owed. He arranged a propane delivery, filled the kitchen cupboards, and found someone to inspect the roof before more rain arrived.
Nora listened to his calls from the far end of the kitchen table. When he hung up, she sometimes asked the same question twice, checking exactly what had been promised and who would be coming to the house.
He answered both times.
On his third night there, he was stacking dry wood beneath the rear overhang when the porch door opened behind him.
“You’re going to wear yourself out,” Nora said.
“I’m nearly finished.”
“I don’t mean the wood.”
Grant stood with a split log in his hands.
“You can’t put four years in order before next weekend,” she said.
He looked down at the log, then set it carefully on the stack. “I keep trying to.”
“I noticed.”
There was a familiar dryness in her voice, faint but unmistakable. He almost smiled. Then he saw the envelope she was holding.
“I had this in my coat when we got out of the duplex.”
His name was written across the front. Beneath it, a military address stopped halfway through a line.
Nora handed it to him.
“I wrote it before the fire. I kept thinking I’d finish the address, or call somebody and ask. Then I’d think about what happened if it reached the wrong hands.”
The envelope had been opened. Inside, the paper was worn where it had been folded and unfolded.
Grant read by the porch light.
Grant,
I’m writing because there has to be a record of me telling the truth, even if I can’t find the courage to mail it yet.
Please don’t decide who I am from anything someone shows you. I have not stopped loving you. I have not chosen anyone else.
The rest came in uneven paragraphs. Nora wrote around Dean’s threats and Vivian’s contempt. She approached the pregnancy, then retreated from naming it. She asked for a chance to speak to him without an audience, without a picture or another person standing between them.
Grant finished, returned to the beginning, and read it once more.
“I keep thinking that if I’d gotten this…” He stopped.
Nora waited.
“I want to tell you I would’ve believed you.”
“Would you?”
He folded the letter along its softened creases.
“I believed them instead.”
From inside the house came Helen’s slow voice, answering something G.T. had said in his sleep.
Grant looked toward the door. “I can’t ask you to trust what I say.”
“No.”
“Then watch what I do.”
Nora pulled her coat closer. After a moment, she opened the porch door and held it for him.
The days that followed had little room for grand declarations. There were clinic visits and repair estimates, benefits questions and legal appointments. A paternity test confirmed what Nora had always known. Grant began the process of establishing his place on his son’s birth record.
G.T. followed him around the house, stopping whenever Grant turned as though he had only happened to want something in that room.
Near the end of the extended leave, they went to the county courthouse.
Helen came in a wheelchair. G.T. wore a clean shirt that Nora had pressed on a towel because there was no ironing board. Grant bought a small bunch of flowers at a grocery store, and Nora held them awkwardly until Helen told her to lift them higher for the photograph.
The marriage gave them protections they needed. It also asked something of them they were still learning how to give. Nora met Grant’s eyes when she made her vows, and he did not mistake the steadiness of her voice for an easy return to the way they had been.
Two days later, he drove to Darrow.
Nora’s letter was inside his jacket. In a folder on the seat beside him lay the paternity result and the papers concerning G.T.’s birth certificate.
He parked outside his parents’ building, took the folder, and pressed their doorbell…
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