“I need you to adopt her before I die.”
“Trust you? You’re handing me a stranger’s photograph and asking me to bring her into our family, and you won’t even tell me why?”
“I’ll explain everything, I swear. But first, bring her home. She has no one else.”
I searched his face for the man I had married.
I found only a dying stranger with pleading eyes.
“Is she yours, David? Is that what this is? A daughter you had before me?”
“You won’t even tell me why?”
He closed his eyes.
A single tear slid down his hollow cheek.
“Please, my love. Don’t make me answer that now. Just bring her home.”
I know how it sounds.
But I had loved this man for fifteen years, and he was slipping away from me one breath at a time.
Refusing him felt like killing him twice.
He was slipping away from me
So I said yes.
***
Grace arrived on a rainy Tuesday.
