The Man Who Rejected Me at My Cousin’s Wedding Was Standing at My Front Door Nine Months Later

Part 2: The Envelope

Emma didn’t move.

The Target bag was on its side in the driveway and a package of dish sponges had rolled out and neither of us was picking it up.

Daniel turned to look at her. Slowly. Like a man turning to look at a sound in the dark.

“Emma?” he said.

“You know her?” I said.

“I don’t know her,” he said. “I met her. At the wedding. She, she was your sister, right?”

“I’m her sister,” Emma said. Still standing next to her car. Still not moving.

The baby made a small sound in the car seat. A snuffle. None of us looked down.

“Emma,” I said. “What did you just say.”

She didn’t answer.

“Emma.”

“Can we go inside,” she said. “Please. Can we not do this on the porch.”

I looked at Daniel. Daniel looked at me. He picked up the car seat with both hands, the way you pick up something you’ve been told is fragile and you don’t trust yourself with, and he followed me into the house.

Emma came in last. She closed the door behind her.

I put water on for tea because I did not know what else to do with my hands. Daniel set the car seat on the kitchen table and stood next to it with one finger hooked through the handle, like he was afraid someone was going to take it.

Emma sat down. She put her keys on the table. She did not take off her coat.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. I need you both to let me say this without interrupting.”

“Emma, whose baby is that.”

“Rachel. Please.”

I sat down. Daniel didn’t.

Emma looked at her hands.

“Her name is Nora,” she said. “She’s four months old. She’s my friend Kayla’s daughter.”

“Kayla,” Daniel said.

“You met her at the wedding. Brown hair. Green dress. She was my plus-one.” Emma looked up at him. “You spent the night with her, Daniel. In room 412. She left before you woke up.”

Daniel sat down.

He sat down very slowly, the way you sit down when your legs have stopped listening.

“I don’t,” he said. “I don’t remember.”

“I know you don’t,” Emma said. “That’s kind of the whole problem.”

The kettle started to whistle. Nobody moved.

I got up and turned it off.

“Emma,” I said. My voice sounded far away to me. “Explain.”

She took a breath.

“Kayla was going through a hard time,” she said. “Her fiancé had left her three weeks before the wedding. Like, cleaned out the apartment left. She wasn’t going to come with me, and I made her come, because I thought it would be good for her to get out. And at the reception she had a lot to drink and she met Daniel at the bar and, you know.”

“And I know,” Emma said, “because she told me the next morning in the car. She was crying. She said he was really nice at first and then he told her she wasn’t really his type but they went upstairs anyway. And I said, wait, Daniel Whitman? And she said yeah. And I said, Kayla, he said the exact same thing to Rachel an hour earlier.”

Daniel put his face in his hands.

“I don’t do that,” he said, into his palms. “I don’t say that. I don’t.”

“You said it to me too,” I said quietly. “In the exact same words.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“I do.”

Emma kept going.

“Two months later she found out she was pregnant. She didn’t want to tell you. She was ashamed of the whole night. She said, and I’m quoting, ‘I don’t want a baby whose father thinks I wasn’t good enough to be nice to.’ And I said, Kayla, he has a right to know. And she said, if he has a right to know, then let him prove he wants to know.”

“What does that mean,” Daniel said. Still into his hands.

“It means she wanted a test,” Emma said. “Not a DNA test. A different kind.”

She reached into her purse.

She took out an envelope.

It was the twin of the one Daniel had pulled from his coat. Marriott stationery. My handwriting on the front. Except this one was still sealed.

“I wrote two letters,” Emma said. “One to you. One that I was going to give to Kayla to hold on to. Both with Rachel’s address, because Rachel’s address is the one you’d already been given, on a napkin, that same night. You put it in your suit pocket and you never looked at it. Kayla saw you do it.”

“I never,” Daniel started.

“You did,” Emma said. “You just don’t remember.”

I sat down at the table across from my sister.

“Emma,” I said. “Where is Kayla.”

Emma’s face did something I had never seen it do.

“That’s the part,” she said, “where I need you to not hate me.”

She put the sealed envelope on the table between us.

“Kayla died six weeks ago,” she said. “Postpartum preeclampsia. She was fine and then she wasn’t and by the time they got her to the hospital it was too late. Nora was with her mother in North Carolina. Her mother is seventy-one years old and has stage four ovarian cancer and cannot raise a baby, Rachel, she cannot, she is dying, she has months.”

“Emma.”

“Kayla left a will. A real one. She did it two weeks before Nora was born because she was scared, she said she had a feeling, and I said don’t be morbid, and she did it anyway. And the will says that if she dies, Nora goes to her biological father, if he wants her. And if he doesn’t want her, Nora goes to me.”

The kitchen was very quiet.

Daniel lifted his face out of his hands.

“You sent me the money,” he said.

“I sent you the money.”

“You sent me the baby.”

“I drove the baby to your building this morning and I asked the doorman to bring her up to your door and I sat in the lobby until I saw you open it and pick her up. Yes.”

“Emma, that is, that is not, you can’t just.”

“I know,” she said. “I know. But I had to know, Daniel. I had to know what you would do. Because if you were the man who was going to leave a baby on a doorstep, I was not going to hand her to you. I was going to raise her myself. And if you were the man who was going to pick her up and drive three hours to find the woman who wrote the note, then maybe.”

She stopped.

“Maybe what,” Daniel said.

“Maybe you were worth telling the truth to.”

I looked at the baby.

She was still asleep. Her little chest going up and down under a yellow blanket I did not recognize. Emma had probably bought the blanket. Emma had been buying blankets, I realized, for six weeks.

“Emma,” I said. “Why my address.”

She looked at me.

And for the first time since she’d walked in, her eyes filled up.

“Because,” she said, “the note in his coat pocket that night. The napkin. It didn’t have Kayla’s address on it. It had yours.”

“What.”

“He asked Kayla for her number and she panicked and gave him yours. She said she couldn’t do it. She said if he wanted to find her, he’d have to work for it, and if he didn’t work for it, at least it wouldn’t be her he was ignoring.”

“He asked for her number,” I said slowly, “and she gave him mine.”

“Yes.”

“And he never called.”

“He never called.”

I looked at Daniel.

He was looking at the baby.

He was crying, I realized. Not making any sound. Just crying.

“I never called,” he said, “because I threw the napkin away.”