CHAPTER 5 – MARGARET’S FIRST TOUCH
Margaret did not touch the baby immediately.
That mattered.
Claire noticed.
The older woman crouched near the grave, tears gathering but not falling yet, one hand hovering in the air and then stopping before it reached the cream swaddle. She looked at Claire instead.
“May I?” Margaret asked.
The question undid Claire.
So many people in her life had taken, grabbed, decided, claimed. Margaret, even in shock, asked permission.
Claire nodded.
Margaret extended one trembling finger and gently touched the edge of the blanket, not Lily’s face yet. The newborn stirred, mouth softening in sleep.
“She has his chin,” Margaret whispered.
Claire laughed once through tears. “That’s what I thought.”
Margaret covered her mouth.
For a moment, grief and wonder moved across her face together, neither winning. She looked down at the gravestone, then back at Lily.
“Daniel knew?”
“Yes.”
Margaret’s voice broke. “He knew he was going to be a father?”
Claire nodded, crying harder now. “He wanted to tell you. We were going to. I was scared, and then… I’m so sorry.”
Margaret looked at her sharply.
Not angry.
Wounded.
“Do not apologize for surviving something I didn’t know how to help you carry.”
Claire stared at her.
The words were too kind. Too unexpected. She did not know where to put them.
Margaret sat fully on the damp grass and looked suddenly older. “I spent months asking God why nothing of him was left here except stone.”
Claire glanced at Lily.
“He left her,” she whispered.
The baby sighed softly in sleep.
Margaret began to cry then.
Not the careful tears of a woman at a cemetery. Real tears. Uncontrolled. Her shoulders shook. Her black coat folded around her like a collapsing wall.
Claire shifted closer but did not know whether to comfort her.
May you like
Margaret reached out, not to the baby this time, but to Claire.
The young woman leaned into the older woman’s arms with Lily between them, all three held in the impossible space beside Daniel’s grave.
