CHAPTER 27 Nancy

SPRING 2017

The package has collected a fine layer of dust.

Nancy’s been avoiding opening it since Angela Creighton sent it over a few weeks ago. It’s been moved from the sideboard in the front hall to the kitchen counter, to the desk in her office, to the top of the dresser in her bedroom. Every time she moves it during a weekly tidy-up blitz, she halfheartedly considers opening it and just getting the whole damn thing over with. She figured she knew what was in Frances’s letter, but had no desire to willfully rip open a wound that she had carefully stitched together over the past thirty-seven years. That scar is fine and faded now; sometimes she can hardly even tell it’s there. Unless she inspects it too closely, which is exactly what this package is calling her to do.

On a warm Saturday afternoon, Nancy finally gets up the courage to open it. She fetches a pair of scissors from the overflowing junk drawer in the kitchen and climbs the stairs back up to her room. She sits down on the bed and with a sigh, snips open the white bubble mailer, emptying the contents onto her lap.

Nancy picks up Margaret’s note. She notices that the edges are singed on one side of the note, burn marks that weren’t there when she first discovered it all those years ago. She pictures her mother, striking a match over the sink and holding the flame to the note before having a change of heart. Nancy knows that the prevailing wisdom at the time was to not tell children they were adopted, but her mother obviously had some reservations about that, even though she never acted on them. She wonders if Frances had kept the note and booties as some kind of shrine to Margaret, the girl who had given her the child she and her husband so desperately wanted.

She unfolds the photocopy of the obituary Angela Creighton found, sees Margaret Roberts’s name in black and white. She reaches over to her bedside table and opens the drawer, digs in the back, and withdraws the small drawstring pouch she’s kept Margaret’s booties in since her mother gifted them to her at her baby shower.

She lifts the booties and Margaret’s note up to her heart and holds them there for a long time, as though trying to absorb some of their long-forgotten energy. At least now she knows why no Margaret Roberts ever contacted her, tried to find her. She’s carried that resentment around for decades, but she can release it now.

Next, Nancy reads the news article about the closure of the maternity home, considers the horrors Margaret and the other girls might have experienced there. Her heart fills with a new kind of compassion for the poor girl. She remembers the confessions of that nun she sat with at St. Sebastian’s, that the girls at that home were lied to, their babies sold. A new wave of horrendous realization hits her at the thought that she may have been purchased by her parents. Was the home she was born at anything like the one that existed in the St. Sebastian’s building? She bookmarks that for now. It deserves a deeper dive if she can handle the research. And she should try to learn more about Margaret, if there is any more to learn.

Wiping away a tear, she picks up the final item in the package: her mother’s letter. She deliberately left it for last. It’s written on the same heavyweight paper Frances always used, purchased from an expensive British stationer in Rosedale. As soon as she sees her mother’s handwriting, the tears start to fall in earnest. When she’s finished reading, she curls up on the bed, bringing her head to her hands as she sobs into them.

Please forgive me, my dear.

She would give everything she owns for the opportunity to tell her mother that she does forgive her. That as a mother now herself, she understands the overwhelming power of a parent’s desire to protect their child from harm and heartache.

She thinks back to 2010, trying to recall everything about that year and pinpoint how the letter went astray.

She was living in the apartment above Thompson’s then. After the affair, she’d been the one to move out of their family home. Katherine was angry with them both but didn’t want her dad to leave, and a big part of Nancy was happy for the solitude. She wanted to go back to the city, to walk the streets she’d walked as a young woman, before she met Len, or Michael, or had the responsibilities of a career and children. When she was a purer version of herself and hadn’t made so many concessions yet. Hadn’t told so many lies. She needed to find herself again.

The apartment was meant to be a stopgap until her divorce from Michael was finalized and their assets were split, but she’d ended up staying longer than expected when Frances’s health rapidly declined. She didn’t have the energy to look for a new place until after the funeral. That’s when she bought this house in Oakville, with an extra room for Katherine, who divided her time between Nancy and Michael.

Frances died in February 2010, so it’s likely the letter was posted by her lawyer sometime that month. Nancy thinks back on all the times she reached into that mailbox and pulled out the flyers and bills that were addressed to the antiques store. She would pop into the shop right away, if it was open, and hand the rogue mail over to the bleached, tucked, and highly polished woman who owned the store. Nancy wonders which day it was that she reached her hand into her own mailbox, never knowing that the most important letter of her life was waiting for her just inches away, inside the box for Thompson’s.

Nancy sits up, crosses her legs underneath her on the cream-colored duvet, and reads her mother’s letter through again. She wanted Nancy to go find Margaret, but Nancy failed. Margaret Roberts is dead, and Nancy can never fulfill her mother’s final wish. She adds it to the long list of things she should have done in her life and didn’t.

The tears are still pouring down Nancy’s face when Katherine appears at her open bedroom door.

“Mom? What’s wrong?”

“Oh, Jesus. I’m sorry, Katherine,” Nancy mutters, swiping ineffectively at her eyes. She should have locked her door. Damnit. “I—”

“What is it? What happened?” Her daughter steps into the room and sits down beside Nancy. Katherine is thirty now, but still living at home while she finishes a seemingly never-ending Ph.D. program. “Mom? You’re scaring me.”

“Oh, sweetheart, I’m sorry,” Nancy says, pulling her into a tight hug. “Everything’s fine, it’s fine. No one’s sick or anything. It’s just…”

She releases Katherine, tucks a strand of sandy hair behind her daughter’s ear, casting around for some excuse to give, a white lie to tell.

“Mom, whatever it is, you have to just let it out.”

Nancy lets her daughter’s words sink in, so similar to what Michael said that night in the nursery when he begged her to be honest with him. Nancy hadn’t expected to be taking advice from her own kid just yet. But Katherine is introverted and wise, and Nancy promised herself to always be as truthful as possible with her daughter.

As she looks into Katherine’s wide blue eyes, identical to Michael’s, the exhaustion finally bears down on Nancy’s shoulders. She’s so tired of running from this, of collecting secrets and keeping them sealed up in the impenetrable vault inside her heart. It’s time to set them free. She sees her mother’s words, and decides—for once—to take her advice. Heed her warning.

If I have learned anything from this, it is not to keep secrets. They fester like wounds, and take even longer to heal once the damage sets in. It’s permanent, and crippling, and I want more for you than that.

She takes Katherine’s hands in her own and tells her daughter the thing she has never revealed to a single living soul.

“I was adopted.”

Nancy spends the next fifteen minutes relaying her story to Katherine. She tells her about Margaret being dead, and that her birth name was Jane. That Katherine’s grandmother kept the secret from Nancy until she died, never knowing that Nancy already knew. Katherine holds her mother’s hands and passes a tissue when she needs it. She’s a good listener, and helps Nancy release the demon that’s been lodged in her chest for decades.

“I’m so sorry, Mom. So, you never told anyone about this?” Katherine asks. “You never even told Dad?”

“No. No, I didn’t. To be honest with you, I didn’t tell him a lot of things. When you find your person, Katherine, don’t make the same mistake I did. Please.”

Katherine purses her lips and seems to waffle on the edge of saying something.

“What is it?” Nancy asks.

Katherine shakes her head, her curtain of hair swinging back and forth. “I just think you guys need to talk to each other,” she says. “He’s still really sad, Mom. He has been since you separated. I know that’s not related to this.” She indicates the pile of evidence on the bed beside Nancy. “But regardless, I think you should tell him this and talk to him about how he’s feeling. And I know you miss him, too, I mean come on.”

Nancy notices a warm flare in her gut. “He didn’t put you up to this, did he?”

“Of course not. I shouldn’t have even said anything, but you seem so sad, and Dad’s sad, and I think you might be sad for the same reasons. Just call him.”

Nancy nods, though unsure. “Okay. Maybe I will. Sorry about this.” She waves a hand at her blotchy, damp face.

“It’s okay. I love you, Mom.” Katherine plants a kiss on Nancy’s cheek and makes her way to the door.

“Katherine.”

She turns, and Nancy sees it more clearly this time: her daughter is indeed wise beyond her years. “Yeah?”

“Thank you for being here for me.”

“S’okay. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Nancy says.

“I’m gonna go run you a bath, okay?”

Nancy nods. “Thank you, dear. That sounds great.”

Nancy tries to compose herself, listens to the bathroom door opening, Katherine turning on the faucet, the thunderous gush of the bathtub filling up.

After Katherine wanders back across the hall to her own bedroom, Nancy reads through Margaret’s note and her mother’s letter one more time, then stumbles downstairs to the kitchen and pours herself a large glass of red wine.

A minute later, she turns off the faucet, plucks her lavender oil from the medicine cabinet, and shakes a few drops into the tub. Nancy watches the ripple effect, considers the chain of events in her own life that began small, then grew so big that she couldn’t have stopped them from expanding even if she’d tried.

But she never really tried.

She sets her wineglass down with a clink on the ceramic ledge, places her phone on the floor beside it, then lets her clothes fall to the tile floor of the bathroom and slides into the tub, relaxing into the heat with puffy eyes.

The house is silent again, and her thoughts are loud in her mind.

Half an hour later, the water has cooled and Nancy’s eyes have dried. She reaches over the tub ledge, dripping water all over the tiles, and picks up her phone. She sends a message to Angela Creighton.

I’m sorry I was short with you before. It was a lot to take in. I’ve changed my mind about speaking with Margaret’s friend—could you please set up the meeting?


When Nancy calls Michael to see if he would be willing to speak with her, she fully expects him to say no. She didn’t want to hope that what Katherine said was true; that he had been lonely and unhappy since they divorced. It’s only once she actually dials Michael’s number that it occurs to her this may be some misplaced Parent Trap effort on Katherine’s part, but much to Nancy’s surprise, it isn’t. Michael agrees to meet with her for coffee, and they arrange a date and time and hang up the phone.

After that, Nancy wears her carpet bare pacing back and forth, wondering what she will say. She isn’t entirely sure what she’s hoping for, but she knows this is a step she must take. If Michael is still as miserable as she is after all these years of separation, it’s at least worth a shot to try to make amends, explain to him her theory of why she thinks their marriage failed. Because despite his affair, she takes responsibility. She married him without ever telling him the secret of her birth, of her clandestine operations as part of the Jane Network, or even that she’d had an abortion before they met. She kept under wraps most of the things that defined her. It hadn’t been fair of her to expect Michael to understand her or trust her.

Nancy arrives at the café in advance, hoping that sitting down with a cup of herbal tea for a while might calm her nerves somewhat. When she sees Michael approaching the door through the front window of the café, her stomach leaps and she notices how gray his temples and beard are now. But the thing that catches her breath is the thought of how crushed she’ll feel if he isn’t willing to give their marriage another chance. It catches her off guard, and she’s therefore unprepared when Michael, after a moment of hesitation, moves in for a hug.

“Good to see you, Nancy,” he says in a rather formal way, as though they’re old work colleagues and nothing more. In a way, they are. Between monitoring finances, scheduling extracurricular activities, and the never-ending stream of logistical planning required for both the present and future, a good percentage of marriage is just business management.

“You, too, Mike.” Nancy sits back down and clears her throat. “I ordered you a coffee. It should be here in a sec. You still take it two creams, right?”

Michael smiles without showing his teeth. “Yup. Thanks.”

The coffee arrives a moment later and the barista shuffles off.

Nancy forces herself to make eye contact with her ex-husband. They haven’t been alone together in a long time.

“So, thanks for coming to meet me,” she begins. “Katherine told me that I should maybe contact you. That you had said some things to her that made her think we should… talk.”

Michael shifts in his seat and his eyes dart toward the door of the café. She hopes he isn’t thinking of leaving.

“Yeah. I probably shouldn’t have said anything. It was over Christmas, and you know, Christmas. It’s packed full of nostalgia. My mom had just died, and on her way out she got me thinking about the past. Reviewing things, you know.”

Nancy nods, thinking of her own grandmama.

The Past, my dear.

He runs his hand over the table, flicks a crumb off the surface, and Nancy resists the urge to reach out for his hand. “Having Katherine there with me, but without you, it just, it felt like something was missing. Katherine asked if I was okay. She’s pretty intuitive.”

Nancy smiles. “Yes, she is.”

“And I guess I told her—” He fidgets with the mug handle, then looks at Nancy. “I told her I had been thinking about you, and, I don’t know, maybe wishing things could be more like they were before.”

Nancy takes a sip of her tea, considering. “Hmm. She’s not very good at keeping secrets, is she? Good girl,” she adds in an undertone.

Michael exhales a small chuckle. “No.”

“Not like her mother,” Nancy says. She didn’t intend to blurt it out like that. But then, she supposes that’s why she asked Michael to meet with her, so maybe it’s best to just spit it out. “The thing is, Mike, I don’t think you ever really knew me at all,” Nancy says through a thick throat. “And that’s my fault. I own that.”

Michael sighs heavily, eyes falling to his hands clasped around the glass mug. The memories of other sighs, of love and pleasure and mutual adoration of their child, echo back at her across the table.

“Mike—”

“I’ve really missed you, Nance.”

They hold their breath and absorb what he’s just admitted. What it might mean for them both. The spring wind whispers through the leaves of the trees in the park next to the café. The trees that, in a few short months, will turn red and gold in one last spectacular curtain call before the bitter winter strips them bare.

All of this is fleeting, it says. There’s no more time to waste…

Nancy’s having a reckless week, agreeing to meet with her birth mother’s friend and maybe get some closure there, and now stumbling through a desperate reconciliation with her ex-husband. She might as well tell him how she’s truly feeing. Nancy licks her lips and glances up at Michael, then sees Katherine in the clear blue of his eyes. The child that binds them together, no matter what.

“Oh, Mike. I miss you, too. So much.”

She reaches across the table and squeezes the tops of his hands with her own. She remembers holding his hands like this all those years ago when they slid golden rings onto each other’s fingers and vowed to always be honest and true.

Nancy wasn’t.

She holds his gaze and forces herself to not let go.

“I need to tell you about Jane.”