“Are you okay?” I rasped over the dryness in my throat and mouth at the expression on her face. It was pained, lost, and hurting all at the same time.
Not turning to look at me, she shrugged. “Define okay. Am I okay health-wise? Yes. Am I okay emotionally? No.”
Pushing back the comforter, I reached down for the sweats I’d dropped there last night. I knew from my own experiences that asking her to define and explain what she meant would be tricky, so I approached it from an angle I found easier to analyze when I felt like this.
“What’s going on inside your head, baby?”
“I miss him,” she said so quietly, I almost didn’t hear her. “You know that, and you know how it feels, so I don’t need to explain it any deeper than that, but at different times, I get hit by a feeling…” she trailed off as her voice broke “…like I’m lost. It’s like feeling alone, even though I know I’m not, but I know something’s missing.”
Squatting down beside her, I skimmed the tip of my index finger down her arm, stopping when she turned her hand palm-side up and slid mine into it, hoping it’d give her some security.
“Did you dream about Callum? Is today a special day?”
It was important to me to be aware of special days—we all had them. Specific dates we remembered where we’d done something with the person we’d lost, dates that were specific to them and we’d never forget. If I knew which ones they were, I could be prepared to help her through them or even celebrate when she needed us to.
“No,” she sighed, finally looking away from the window and down at our hands. “I don’t know what to do about Jeremy, and I’ve been burying my head in the sand about it.”
“Baby, you only just found out about him, so that’s not burying your head in the sand. You need time—just like anyone in your shoes would—to come to terms with what you’ve found out. There’s the information Sid Owens left that you still have to sift through, the DNA test, and then you can decide what you want to do about it.”
“That’s what’s eating away at me—what do I do about it? Part of me wants to leave it well alone and maybe revisit the whole thing in a few years. Part of me wants to memorize every detail in that folder and get the DNA test done.
“Part of me is too afraid to do any of that in case it turns out we’re not related, and someone got the story messed up. Then there’s the part of me that still feels so guilty I’ve got a second chance at having a sibling in my life when Callum never got it, and I feel like I’m being disloyal to him.”
For a moment, I felt overwhelmed. I didn’t have any siblings, and so many times over the years, I’d have given a limb to have one, even if they’d appeared out of nowhere like Jeremy had for Naomi. But in her shoes, I likely would have felt the same way. What if I found out I’d been adopted, and my birth parents suddenly appeared? In that instance, even just touching on the possibility right now, I’d probably feel like she was.
And it was that realization that helped me answer her. “Naomi, Callum would want to know him, wouldn’t he?” Naomi looked up from our hands and nodded. “So, knowing that, does it make the answer easier for you?”
A tear slowly made its way down her cheek, only just visible through the dim lighting from outside. “Kind of. It just hurts.”
I’d never lied to her before now, and I wasn’t going to start now.
“It’s going to, baby. I hate to say it to you, but it’s going to hurt.” When her breath caught audibly, I leaned in and wiped the tracks the tears were leaving away with my free hand.
“But then you might find it feels good. If the DNA test comes back positive and he turns out to be a good guy, you might find it opens up the world a bit and brings in more happiness and love.
“Think about it, Jeremy’s been without y’all since you were born, and he’s recently found out he potentially has a sister and lost a brother. You could heal each other and fill in spaces you didn’t even know existed in each other’s lives.”
She was silent for a moment as the words sank in, and then some of the tension left her. “What do I tell Shanti?”
“The truth. Well, as much as you can tell a four-year-old without explaining what addicts, crackheads, and monster parents are,” I amended.
“Once you get all of the information you need to be sure and find out from him what role he wants to play in your lives—especially Shanti’s. That’ll help get you to a place where you want to tell her, and you just say how you didn’t know he existed, and that your mom had him before you and her dad were born.”