My hand hovered above the music box.
“Where did you get this?”
“John found it,” Carl said. “He also found the boy who carried it.”
My breath stopped.
For more than half a century, John and I had avoided speaking about our first child. We loved him, but we were teenagers without a home or money. We believed another family could give him what we could not.
“John found our son?”
“A few years ago.”
Anger rose through my grief.
“My husband searched for him and said nothing?”
“He thought he was protecting you.”
“From my own child?”
“From what he discovered.”
I demanded to know who Carl was, but he only said John trusted him to reveal the truth when the time was right.
Overwhelmed, I grabbed the box and left.
At home, I locked the door, closed the curtains, and sat in darkness.
Hours later, Carl knocked.
“Please let me explain.”
“You have destroyed everything I believed about my marriage.”
“No,” he answered. “I am trying to give you the rest of it.”
He waited on the porch until I turned the tiny key on the box. The familiar lullaby carried me back to the day we surrendered our baby.
I opened the door slightly.
“Did John give this to you?”
“My father gave it to me before he died. He said it belonged to his real family.”
“Your father was our son?”
Carl nodded.
I let him inside.
Years earlier, John had located the adoption records and searched for our child. But when he finally found him, our son had already died in a car accident.
Carl was the only family he left behind.
“John found me in a group home,” Carl explained. “He could not tell you that your son was gone.”
I sank into a chair.
“So he hid our grandson too?”
“He planned to tell you. He always said he would do it next spring.”
Instead, John visited Carl every week. He taught him to fish, helped him through school, attended important occasions, and quietly became the grandfather Carl had never known.
Each visit brought him closer to confessing, but also made him fear reopening a wound I had barely survived.
Then John’s heart failed before spring arrived.
PART 3: THE REST OF OUR FAMILY
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