Sister Marguerite was still talking. “I told him you wouldn’t be there, that your last-known address was in Zaire, but he insisted on checking for himself. I think he was hoping to find some family even if he didn’t find you.”

He knew about me. Daniel knew about me before he died. I wasn’t the stranger that I’d imagined I was as I’d stood there outside the ICU staring in. If he’d woken and seen me, he would have recognized me for who I was. The thought makes me want to both laugh and weep.

“Wait,” I ask, needing her to slow down so that I can properly process everything she’s saying. “How did he find out? About me, I mean.”

“I told him.”

“You?”

“Yes. I’d kept the secret all those years, but you know what children are like. They overhear things, don’t they? So he knew a lot more than I gave him credit for. When we finally spoke about it, he said he’d suspected that the nun who’d been sent away the year he was born was his mother, though he didn’t know any of your details beyond the name you’d chosen for yourself, Sister Mary Teresa. He asked me to fill in the blanks and so I did.”

My skull throbbed from the pressure of all my unshed tears and as I winced at the pain of the tension headache, all at once I couldn’t hold them back anymore.

He knew who I was. My boy knew.

“Oh, my dear heart. Oh, you poor, poor thing.” Sister Marguerite held out her arms and swept me into them.

“Daniel, Daniel, Daniel.” I had no words except my son’s name. It was a prayer and an invocation, a confession and a lament; it was please and thank you; it was forgive me and amen.

Sister Marguerite held on tight, riding out the storm with me until the worst had passed. When she sensed that I was able to stand on my own again, she released me and then led me to the couch, where she instructed me to sit down while she hunted for some tissues.

“There you go. Are you feeling a bit better?”

I nodded as I dabbed at my eyes. “Yes, thank you. I’m so sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

“I’m fine now,” I said. “Please continue. You were telling me about his finding out.”

“I was just going to add that he didn’t suspect who his father was until Father Thomas’s trial. That’s when Daniel worked it out for himself.”

“I’m sorry? Father Thomas’s trial? What trial?”

“You didn’t know?”

“No.”

“They wrote to you to see if you would come and be a witness but they never heard back, so I just assumed you wanted to put all that behind you.”

“They? Who’s they?”