His fingers curled and shook as he drew them next to his mouth.
“She had even picked out who it would be.”
The air around me disappeared and I wondered if I would ever breathe again. Marlow took my hand.
His next words were transactional. “We paid her. She needed money. And we needed a child.”
“Her,” I muttered.
“Huh?” he met my eyes as if he forgot I was there.
“You said her. What was her name?”
“Wren,” he answered quickly. “Her name was Wren.”
He didn’t stop there, like it was pain that had to be pushed through.
“All our friends knew we were having trouble getting pregnant. They only assumed we had used a surrogate when Stella never showed. People didn’t really ask questions back then—you kept these kinds of things private. But we had Wren deliver the baby at home, and forged affidavits that it was Stella who had the home birth.”
The way he smiled then made me sick. “We were so happy, Isla. We were so happy to finally have you. You don’t know how it changed your mother. How it brought her back to life.” His smile faded. “But that woman . . . Wren. She wouldn’t leave us alone. She kept trying to take you, our baby. Can you imagine what you would do if someone tried to take your baby?”
He paused and looked at Marlow. “She came back with you. That week we were at the cabin. But we didn’t know about you, I swear. We didn’t know she had another child.”
Marlow lifted her gaze up toward the cabin, as if she could see it all again. “She brought me with her. We camped out in the woods to be near all of you. She kept telling me I was going to meet my sister soon.”
She held tighter to my hand, and I felt myself recoil.
“I’m not saying what she did was right or wrong. But she didn’t deserve it.”
“What didn’t she deserve?” I asked forcefully.
Marlow turned her head back to him. “Why don’t you tell her . . . Dad?”
“You don’t get to call me that . . . not anymore,” he said through gritted teeth.
I placed my hand out, to guide and steady myself. “You lived in the woods . . . before we found you. With our mother . . .”
Our mother. I had let that fall through my lips.
I pointed to her. My hand quivered and kept pointing, as if it were a gun in my hand, aimlessly looking for a target until it settled on Dad.
“The tent. The yellow tent I saw you with that day. You were throwing it away. I remember . . . I remember that tent.”
He shook his head. “How would you even remember that?”
“It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that I do.”
“Isla,” he said pleadingly.
“No. Tell me I’m wrong.” A cry caught in my throat.
“I want to . . .”
“No. Tell me it isn’t true. That you couldn’t have . . .”
“I can’t,” he said, hushed.
“Why not?” I demanded. “Why not?”
“It was the right thing to do!” he yelled. His shook his hands in front of him, the potency of his shout causing flickers of water to fly through the air.
I bent forward, my midsection contracted, and the back of my throat opened up. There was nothing left inside me to be sick. I would have given anything to be sick, to release the disgust that foamed inside me.
He got up slowly, on his knees, as if still trying to find a way into our good graces.
“She was coming to take you, Isla. She wasn’t going to stop until she finally took you away from us. I tried to make it all go away. She wouldn’t leave us alone. And then to follow us . . . our family . . . up here. To this place. I tried to talk some sense into her. I tried. I really did.”
He stared at Marlow.
“She was beautiful.”
I felt her shudder next to me.
He shook his head rapidly, trying to erase what happened.
“I still don’t know how it got to that point. She wouldn’t listen to me. She wouldn’t let anything I was trying to explain to her make sense. I was screaming at her to leave us alone, but she wouldn’t stop asking me to give back her baby . . . her baby. She was like this—this machine that you could never turn off. But she had agreed to it, remember—she knew exactly what she was getting into. Didn’t that mean something? She knew how much we wanted a child.”
“Jesus!” I shouted out, doubling over, hugging myself.
