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I frown. “Who haven’t I forgiven?”
She laughs. “Who do you have to forgive?”
I shrug. “That douchebag who tried to get me to sleep with him in exchange for a reference?”
Her nose crinkles. “No, definitely don’t forgive him. How about your grandmother and aunt?”
I stop in place. “I don’t have any family.”
“Mimi and her daughter...Natalie? Wasn’t that her name?”
I start walking again. “Mimi died a few years after she ditched me, apparently—I looked her up—and Natalie can go fuck herself. She’s had two decades to reach out, and she chose not to.”
“You can’t truly choosenotto forgive her until you know what happened,” Lynn says.
I disagree. I can choose not to forgive whoever I want. But when we get back to Lynn’s place, after an hour of internal debate, I pull out my laptop and search for Natalie’s name. The fact that she’s a doctor makes her relatively easy to find.
Natalie Collins, molecular oncologist, National Institutes of Health.
“Nice of you to look for a cure for cancer but leave me in foster care,” I mutter at her perky staff photo.
Lynn, puttering around the kitchen, simply laughs. “Try not to say that right away.”
I tap on her email address and stare at the blank screen as I channel a professionalism I don’t feel. This woman and her mother left me to languish, but my purpose here isn’t really to rage at herorto forgive her. I just want to know who my father was. I want to understand what happened...and if I’m the reason he did it.
Hi Natalie,
This is Kate Bennett. I assume you know who I am. I’m doing some family research and had a few questions when you have a minute.
Best,
Kate
I expect nothing to come from this exercise, aside from shutting Lynn up, but within minutes, Natalie’s response has landed in my inbox.
She tells me she’s sorry. That her mother had a stroke in the process of adopting me and needed full-time care for the rest of her life. Natalie thought I was too young to understand and would be better off thinking Mimi had just changed her mind.
She apologizes for not doing more to help me, and admits that at some level she’d blamed me for her brother’s death. My mother was threatening to tell the university about their affair when he jumped, apparently. She says she’d like to speak to me if I’m open to it. That one day I might even like to meet my cousins, as she’s now the mother of two boys.
My throat is tight as I hand the laptop to Lynn so she can read Natalie’s email. It shouldn’t matter after all this time that Mimi didn’t abandon me, didn’t just decide I wasn’t worth her effort, but it does.
“Do you forgive her now?” Lynn asks when she’s done.
I hitch a shoulder. “Yeah. I’d probably have done the same thing in her shoes. I don’t love the fact that I’m the product of a sketchy professor and a blackmailer, however.”
She smiles. “Or maybe you’re the product of a brilliant man who made a mistake and a resourceful nineteen-year-old whose back was against a wall. You get to choose which parts of your DNA you hold dear.”
If I could forgive myself for what I did to Beck, I might even believe her.
43
KATE
I’m walking into an afternoon NA meeting two weeks later when my phone rings. At this hour, it’s typically Rachel, calling after she’s gotten Jane down for a nap. Occasionally, it’s Natalie, whose only free minutes come in the afternoon when she’s driving from NIH to her sons’ school in DC.
This time, though, it’s Jeremy.
I’ve been ignoring his calls since our breakfast meeting, and I’m tempted to ignore him now, too, because I just want to forget it all, but it’s probably time to get this over with.
