We stood in the schoolyard while Lily and Bella eyed each other from 10 feet away with the particular suspicious fascination of identical-looking strangers.
Daniel looked between the two girls and let out a slow breath. “That is genuinely uncanny,” he said. But he recovered quickly. “Kids look alike sometimes,” he added.
And the way Susan’s hand tightened on Bella’s shoulder told me she’d had the same thought and was already pushing it back down.
“That is genuinely uncanny.”
***
I couldn’t sleep that night. I lay in the dark and went through it again, slowly, the way you press a bruise to confirm it’s real.
Ava was three years old. She was gone. That’s what I had forced myself to believe.
But grief doesn’t believe in logic, and mine had found the one crack it could fit through.
“I need a DNA test,” I said, facing the ceiling.
John was quiet for long enough that I thought he’d fallen asleep.
Then he said, “Grace…”
Grief doesn’t believe in logic.
“I know what you’re going to say, John. That I’m spiraling. That this is grief. That I’ll hurt myself more than I’m already hurting.” I turned to face him in the dark. “But I’ll hurt more not knowing. And you know that too.”
He stared at the ceiling for a long time.
“If it comes back negative,” he said finally, “you have to let her go. Really let her go. Can you promise me that?”
I reached for his hand under the covers and held it.
“Yes, I can.”
“You have to let her go.”
***
Asking Daniel and Susan was the hardest conversation I’ve ever had.
Daniel’s face went from confusion to anger in about four seconds flat, and I didn’t blame him. I was a stranger asking him to question the identity of his child, and no matter how gently John explained it, the request was enormous.
But John told him about Ava quietly and without flinching. About the fever. About the days I couldn’t stand. About the blank space where the memory of a goodbye should be.
I was a stranger asking him to question the identity of his child.
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