It was the photograph that had stood on her mother's dresser. But the copy in Evelyn's locket was sharper, showing the entire collar of Daniel's shirt and a small dimple near his mouth. Naomi remembered tracing that dimple with a fingertip when she was six, wondering if she might someday develop one herself. For a long moment she could not speak. Evelyn turned the locket so that Naomi could see the inscription beneath the portrait, letters worn almost flat by time: D.W., ALWAYS HOME.
"He gave it to me when he was twenty-five," Evelyn said. "He told me I'd never have to worry about where he belonged." Her mouth tightened. "Two years later, he met your mother, and I made sure he knew how unhappy that made me." Naomi looked up sharply. She had heard the distant version of that story, smoothed down by Loretta's kindness until it hardly sounded like cruelty. Evelyn's hands were still open, the picture resting between them. "I was wrong about her before I ever knew her," she said.
Naomi wanted to ask a hundred questions at once. She wanted to know whether Daniel had loved her mother, whether he had planned to stay, whether he had known there was a baby coming. She wanted to know why a woman who had spent decades with that photograph against her heart had not once come to see the girl who carried Daniel's blood. But the question that finally escaped was smaller and far more terrible. "Did my mother come to you?"
Evelyn closed the locket. Robert took a slow breath, and Naomi realized from his face that he already knew the answer. "Yes," Evelyn said. "In February 1990, after Daniel's funeral." The clock above the kitchen doorway ticked with an almost accusing loudness. "She came to our house with a doctor's letter in her purse. She told me she was expecting his child."
Naomi had spent years imagining a hundred possible versions of this meeting, and none had begun with her mother standing pregnant on another woman's porch. She pictured Loretta at twenty-four, too young to have lost the man she loved, holding herself together on a cold morning because there was still a baby to protect. Her mother had never described that visit. She had only said that some people confused grief with permission to be unkind. Naomi set her cup down carefully because her hands had begun to shake. "What did you say to her?"
"I said she was lying." Evelyn's voice broke on the final word, but she kept speaking. "I told her that Daniel was gone and that she should not use his name to ask us for anything. I said there was no place for her or her child in our family." Robert made a small sound, but Evelyn lifted her hand to stop him. "I remember every word, Naomi. I don't get to soften it because I am old now."
"She never asked you for money," Naomi said. "I know she didn't." Evelyn nodded quickly, tears brightening her eyes. Naomi felt a heat rise into her face that had nothing to do with the furnace. "My mother was asking you to know I existed. That's all, isn't it?" Evelyn's shoulders folded forward. "Yes," she whispered. "And I shut the door."
Robert lowered himself onto the couch as though his legs had stopped obeying him. Naomi turned to him. "Where were you?" His answer came slowly, with the weary precision of someone who had repeated it to himself many times. He had been visiting his brother that weekend, and when he returned, Evelyn told him a woman had come claiming to have known Daniel. She said the visitor was confused, perhaps dishonest, and that they should put the matter behind them.