Chapter 4: The Woman in the Photograph
Julian didn't sleep in our bedroom that night.
I didn't ask him to leave.
He simply didn't come upstairs.
I heard the television on low past midnight, then silence, then nothing.
When I came down at six in the morning, the couch cushions were dented and his coffee cup was in the sink, rinsed but not washed.
He had already gone.
He didn't say where.
I called Dorothea at eight.
"He'll try to contest it," I said.
"He can try," she said.
"He won't succeed.
But Claire, there's something else we need to discuss.
Something I held back yesterday because I wanted you to have one night to absorb the first part."
I sat down at the kitchen table.
"Tell me."
"Among Eleanor's documents, there is a photograph.
She included a handwritten note with it.
The note says she found it in Julian's home office seven years ago.
She kept it because she didn't know what to do with it then, and she was afraid of what it meant."
"What's in the photograph?"
"Julian," Dorothea said.
"And a child.
A boy, perhaps five or six years old in the picture.
Eleanor wrote on the back of the note — she believed the boy was Julian's son."
The table felt very far away from my hands.
"She believed," I said.
"Did she find out for certain?"
"She tried.
The woman in the background of the photograph — she identified her eventually.
Her name is Renata Solís.
She and Julian overlapped at a company he worked for before you were married.
Eleanor found a birth record.
The boy's name is Marco.
He would be thirteen now."
Thirteen years old.
Julian and I had been married for nineteen.
"He was already seeing her," I said.
It wasn't a question.
"It appears so," Dorothea said quietly.
"Eleanor didn't know how to tell you.
She was ashamed of her son, and she was afraid you would leave and she would lose you.
She wrote that in the note as well.
She said — and I'm reading her exact words — 'Claire was the only good thing Julian ever chose, and he didn't deserve to keep her.'"
I pressed my hand flat against the table.
"Is there contact information for Renata Solís?" I said.
"There is," Dorothea said.
"Eleanor included it.
She wanted you to have the choice."
---
I didn't call Renata that day.
I needed to think.
What I did instead was go to the house Eleanor had left me.
It was a forty-minute drive, a modest two-story on a quiet street, the kind of house that held its age well because someone had always cared for it.
I had a key for this one too — a proper brass one Dorothea had handed me in a small envelope.
The front door opened into a hallway that smelled like lavender and old wood.
Everything was exactly as I remembered from visits years ago.
The framed photographs on the wall.
The narrow table with the ceramic bowl where Eleanor kept her spare change.
I walked slowly through each room.
In the small study at the back of the house, I found what Eleanor had wanted me to find.
A locked wooden box on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, the kind with a brass latch.
The silver key fit perfectly.
Inside the box: more documents.
Bank statements.
A second handwritten note.
And at the bottom, a photograph I had never seen.
Julian.
Younger.
Smiling.
His arm around a woman I didn't recognize.
And beside them, a small boy with Julian's eyes looking directly at the camera.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
May you like
Julian.
I let it ring.
