Daddy Forgot, but Mommy Remembers novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Interview
Willa walks into her old house as a nanny named Ellie, and the man who once proposed to her looks right through her while their daughter hums a lullaby only Willa ever sang.
The man I was supposed to marry asked me if I had any references.
He sat behind the same oak desk where he once signed a ring receipt with a grin.
I stood in front of it in a borrowed gray cardigan and glasses I didn't need.
"Ellie Wren," I said. "I've done childcare for four years."
That was true. I just didn't say the childcare was inside a prison program.
Christian Thorsby looked at my résumé, then at me.
His gray eyes passed over my face.
Five years ago those same eyes had closed every time I kissed him.
"Four years is good," he said. "Any trouble with kids who don't listen?"
"Kids listen if you do," I said.
He almost smiled.
A scar ran through his left eyebrow now, pale and new, and I wanted to put my thumb on it.
I kept my hands folded in front of me instead.
Behind his chair, a window looked onto the back lawn.
The same white rope swing hung from the same oak.
I had watched the police car park under that tree.
My daughter had been seven months old and asleep upstairs when they put the cuffs on me.
Nobody had let me go up to kiss her.
"Where's the child?" I asked, because Ellie Wren would ask.
"Under the piano," he said, and pointed with his pen.
I turned my head very slowly.
A small girl sat cross-legged in the shadow of the grand piano, drawing on the floor with a purple crayon.
She had my mother's brown curls and Christian's gray eyes.
She was five years old.
I had missed every one of her birthdays, and I knew every date.
"That's Poppy," Christian said. "She doesn't like new people."
"Then I won't be new for long," I said.
My voice shook on the last word, and I covered it with a cough.
He frowned at me, just slightly.
Then he stood, and I made myself stay where I was.
"Poppy, come say hello."
She didn't move.
She kept drawing, and I saw what she was drawing.
It was a row of yellow bees with crooked wings.
I used to draw bees for her on the nursery wall, the week before everything fell apart.
I knelt on the rug, five feet from her, and I didn't reach.
My knees hurt, and my heart hurt worse.
"Hi, Poppy," I said. "I like your bees."
She looked up.
Her eyes went over my glasses, my short hair, my gray sleeves.
She studied me.
Then she went back to her crayon, and she started to hum.
It was five notes, low and a little off key.
My whole body went still.
"Little Bee Under the Porch Light" was a song I made up in a hospital bed at three in the morning.
I'd sung it to her ten thousand times.
Christian and I made up the second verse together, laughing, with his hand on my stomach.
Nobody else on earth knew it.
The song stopped when Poppy looked up and saw my face.
"That's a good hum," I said, and my throat closed on every word.
"She never hums for strangers," Christian said slowly.
He was watching his daughter, and then he was watching me.
For one second something moved behind his eyes.
It looked like a man trying to reach a light switch in a room he'd never been in.
Then it was gone.
"Can you start tonight?" he asked.
I said yes before he finished.
"Good. My fiancée lands tomorrow morning. She'll want to meet you."
The word hit me harder than the cuffs had.
I had known about her.
I had read it in a prison newspaper on a day when my cellmate was kind enough to leave it on my bunk.
Knowing wasn't the same as hearing him say it in my old study, in my old life.
"Of course," I said.
Poppy tugged my cardigan.
I hadn't noticed her crossing the rug.
She was standing right beside my knee, small and warm and real.
She smelled like grape shampoo and crayon wax.
She put her hand flat on my cheek, the way a baby does when she's checking you're there.
"Are you the lady from my dream?" she whispered.
Christian didn't hear.
He had turned to take a call, and his back was to us.
I could have said yes.
I could have said I was her mother, and I'd been looking for her every night for four years.
Instead I put my hand over hers and held it against my face.
"I don't know," I whispered back. "What did she do in your dream?"
Poppy thought about it very seriously.
"She sang," she said. "And then they took her away."
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