That night, while they cut into a cheap chocolate cake, he looked at her with serious eyes.
“Mom, I want to meet them. Just once.”
Chloe felt fear rise inside her.
Not fear of them.
Fear of everything she had buried.
But Leo deserved the truth.
So 3 days later, they got on a bus to Albany.
Chloe carried a backpack, a yellow folder, and a USB drive wrapped in a napkin.
They arrived on a Saturday afternoon.
The house looked exactly the same.
The same brown door.
The same bougainvillea.
The same step where she had cried while pregnant 10 years earlier.
Chloe knocked.
Thomas opened the door.
When he saw her, his face turned pale.
“Chloe?”
Beatrice appeared behind him.
And when she saw Leo, she gasped.
No one spoke.
Leo hid slightly behind his mother.
Chloe took a deep breath.
“I came to tell you the truth.”
Thomas clenched his jaw.
“After 10 years?”
Chloe pulled an old photograph from the folder.
The photo showed a smiling young man wearing an engineer’s hard hat, standing beside Thomas in front of the factory where he had worked his whole life.
Beatrice covered her mouth.
Thomas stepped back.
Chloe placed the photograph on the table.
On the back, written in shaky handwriting, was one sentence:
“Your father tried to save us.”
Thomas began to tremble.
And Leo, not understanding any of it, asked:
“Mom… is that man my dad?”
PART 2:
“Mom… is that man my dad?”
Chloe felt her knees weaken.
For ten years, she had imagined that moment.
She had rehearsed it while silently crying, washing dishes, waiting for buses, and counting coins for diapers.
But nothing could prepare her for hearing Leo ask that question in front of his grandparents.
Thomas couldn’t stop staring at the photograph.
Beatrice cried quietly.
“Yes, sweetheart,” Chloe said, kneeling in front of Leo. “His name was Ethan Vance. And yes, he was your father.”
Leo swallowed.
“Did he know about me?”
Chloe closed her eyes for a second.
“No. He disappeared before I could tell him.”
