“Well?” She ran out of patience.
He dropped the note in his hand on top of the others and removed his black-framed glasses. “I can see why you may think—”
She cut him off. “It’s not an assumption. It’s a conclusion.”
“She doesn’t explicitly make that claim.”
“Why is this so hard for you to believe? Is it me? You don’t want me to be here, like Sabina?” Meena heard the hitch in her voice and cleared her throat.
He reached for her. She shifted away from his touch.
“There are more notes,” Meena argued. “They pop up all the time. So far the pieces fit.”
“Because you want them to,” Sam said.
Need them to. But Meena couldn’t voice that. She wanted him to see the rational truth, not an emotional wish. “You don’t get it. You think because you knew her, she would have told you all of it. But she wasn’t the type to care about people. She had no use for a husband and likely didn’t think she would be a good mother. What if she couldn’t tell anyone and kept it a secret? Maybe she thought this was the only way to acknowledge me.”
Sam rested his elbows on his thighs and clasped his hands. “When we don’t understand the whole, we tend to fill in the missing pieces, like a sentence you can read even when it’s missing all of the vowels.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
He stood and ran his hands over his face. “She told me.”
Meena stilled. “About me?”
“In a way,” Sam said. “Not by name. Parts of it. She was thirty-four when you were born. Married for two years.”
“She didn’t want to be a mother.” Meena’s voice was flat. “There are many women who don’t. You all said, over and over, that she didn’t like people. She wasn’t a nurturer.”
“And what? She hid the pregnancy from her husband?”
“Stop.” Meena didn’t want logic. She couldn’t have been wrong.
“Neha and I used to play chess.” Sam softened his voice. “Whenever she felt like talking, she would set up the board. Not often. I learned quickly that she wanted someone to listen for a few hours.”
Meena closed her eyes. She didn’t want to hear what he had to say.
“About three years ago,” Sam said, “she told me that she’d had a rough day. That she’d noticed the date. August sixth. She was restless. She’d been holding a secret that had become stuck in her throat. She wanted to say it out loud. She wanted to tell it to me.”
“August sixth is my birthday.” She knew she had to hear him out.
Sam nodded. “Now that I’ve put the pieces together, I know.”
Meena sat on the couch and hugged her knees into her body, wrapped her arms around them. Wally wedged his face between her thigh and stomach. She loosened her grip and relaxed her legs. Wally climbed into her lap and nuzzled her. “That’s when she told you about me?”
He shook his head. “Not you specifically, but about the time you were born. She’d been approached by a teenager who needed her help. Neha had been excited to help, proud to be of use to this person. Neha told me she’d helped the girl hide her pregnancy. Found a family to adopt the baby. The girl was so thankful, she’d let Neha name the baby.”
Neha had named her. Her heart cracked. It was as if she were losing someone again. Someone she’d let in, not even all the way in, and still it was painful. “She was talking about me.”
“I didn’t know,” Sam said. “At least not for sure. I wondered, but I didn’t know how much I could say. It wasn’t until you told me the other night. Even then I wasn’t sure how to tell you about this.”