Page 122 of My Unfinished Heart

Once dessert is finished, and there’s some talk of catching fireflies, Helen reaches out to lay her hand on mine. “Hey,” she says.

I raise my eyebrows at her.

“I’d like a minute alone with you, if you don’t mind.”

I glance at Tristan. He smiles, not seeming to care. I’m not sure I don’t, though. The summoning has an ominous undertone. “I’ve never managed to catch a firefly before,” he says.

“Yay!” Kate shouts, and there’s a mass exodus from the dining room.

Gathering some dishes, I follow Helen into the kitchen, the door swinging shut behind me. She sits down at the breakfast table, waiting.

After I put the dishes in the sink, I join her, but I hesitate before sitting. “I’m not interested in your stamp of approval, Nell.”

“You get it anyway. I adore him. He’s a wonderful young man. Emphasis on the young, by the way.”

“Yeah. I’m aware,” I say.

She looks up at me, something hazy in her eyes—wistful. Like she’s about to walk me down an aisle. “I’ve actually never seen you like this.”

She must mean happy. “He’s extremely important to me.”

Helen gives me a look like I need to come to church more often, and in a stern voice says, “I can see how much you love him.”

I wince at the word. “He’s…yeah,” I say, agreeing as well as I can.

“Oh, Jesus, Archer. Okay, listen. I’ve been needing to tell you something, and I’ll try to make it quick. I wasn’t sure if there would ever be a time when you needed to know this, but then I saw you with Tristan tonight, all of you sitting there, I⁠—”

It’s the first time I’ve seen her struggle for words since I was seventeen and she bought a new comforter for the guest room. It has me as nervous now as I was back then. Her forefinger taps her temple. “I’ve never even told West some of this, but he doesn’t need to hear it the way I think you do.”

Jesus. “Why do you think I need to hear it?”

She nods. “That’s a fair question. A good one. I guess since you’ve been home, I’ve been paying attention to the choices you’ve made, and I’ve wondered if maybe some pain could have been avoided if you’d known a little more about where you came from.”

“Is this about my mom, because⁠—”

She cuts me off. “Yes and no.”

I’m so confused. I glance at the door, and then the window that looks onto the backyard where Kate is running in circles with a jar in one hand and a lid in the other. Fireflies flicker randomly in the dusky light. Joey’s laugh rings out, loudly enough that it feels like we’re not alone. “Do you wanna maybe wait to have this conversation another time?”

Helen grips my hand briefly, giving it a tight squeeze. “This won’t take long, baby. Please, sit. Let me get this off my chest.”

She looks worried, and maybe that should worry me, too, but I feel more protective than anything else. I sit down to face her and nod, giving her the permission she seems to need to go on.

She takes her hand back as she seems to gather up all her courage to speak. “I had three miscarriages before I had West. West was um…IVF. I used a sperm donor. My ex left after the third one we lost, and I wasn’t ready to give up. On my ex, yes, but a baby, no. Infertility and loss is one of those things that makes you question everything. Whether you’ve offended God in some way. What your life would mean without this one thing your heart is permanently set on. It was everything to me to have a baby. And I got lucky. I got my miracle.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know you went through all that.”

“Well, West does, and that’s not what I wanted to tell you, but it’s some context, I hope. Anyway, I was flat broke by the time I had him, and I had to work two jobs and rely on family to help me pick up all my slack, and that was so hard. I’d given everything just to have him, and there I was—not able to spend any time with him at all. I was depressed. You understand?”

“Like postpartum depressed?”

“It’s all depression, but yes. Technically, this was during my postpartum period.”

Helen’s never gotten this personal with me before, but I’m easing into the conversation, my anxiety abating. I appreciate the fact that she feels like she can talk to me like an adult now. I also, stupidly, get the feeling I know where this is going. Being a working single mother was hard, it was difficult for her to send West away for school, but she’s so glad he found a friend like me—this would all be on theme for the night, and I’ve heard versions of it before.

But what she tells me after that…

The next part is like a deleted scene from a movie. A scene that makes a big fucking difference. It basically changes the whole story.