Chapter 4: The Blue Notebook
I found the notebook at 3 in the morning.
Blue cover.
Spiral bound.
My father's handwriting filling the pages — addresses, phone numbers, dates — a record that spanned nearly fifteen years.
He had been keeping track of her.
Quietly.
Without ever doing anything.
The most recent entry was eight months old.
An address on the south side of the city.
An apartment building on Carver Street.
I took a photo of the page.
Put the notebook back exactly where I found it.
Went to my room and sat on the edge of my bed until the sky outside the window started to go gray.
By six in the morning I was on a bus heading south.
The building on Carver Street was three stories of weathered brick with a buzzer panel by the front door.
Half the name slots were empty.
I found the name I was looking for on the second floor — handwritten on a small piece of paper, pressed behind the plastic slot.
*C.
Williams.*
I pressed the buzzer.
Nothing.
Pressed it again.
A long pause.
Then a voice, rough with sleep, came through the speaker.
"Who is it?"
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
Tried again.
"My name is Marcus," I said.
"I think you know who I am."
The silence that followed lasted so long I thought she wasn't going to answer.
Then the door buzzed open.
She was waiting in the doorway of apartment 2B when I came up the stairs.
She had a robe pulled tight around her and her hair was loose and she looked nothing like the desperate woman at the fence yesterday.
She looked smaller, standing still.
Her hands were at her sides and she was watching me climb the last few steps with an expression I didn't have a name for.
I stopped on the landing.
We stood four feet apart and neither of us spoke.
She looked at my forehead.
At the birthmark she had seen on a newborn baby eighteen years ago and in a worn photograph ever since.
"Come inside," she said.
Her voice was barely steady.
"Please."
The apartment was small and clean.
A kitchen table with two chairs.
A shelf of books along one wall.
A photograph on the refrigerator — the same photograph she had held at the fence, in a plain frame, placed at eye level where she would see it every day.
I sat down at the table.
She sat across from me and folded her hands and looked at them.
"They told you I d\*ed," I said.
It wasn't a question.
"A woman called me.
Said there were complications." She paused.
"I was nineteen and I had no money and I was in no position to challenge anything.
I believed them.
I had no reason not to."
"The woman who called," I said.
"Was it Diane?
My — " I stopped.
"The woman who raised me."
Cecelia looked up.
Something shifted in her expression.
"She said she was from the agency," she said carefully.
"I didn't recognize the voice.
I never knew for certain."
"I found a letter in her handwriting last night.
Dated the year I was transferred."
The color left her face.
"What did the letter say?"
I pulled out my phone and showed her the photo I had taken of the notebook page.
Then I took the letter from my pocket and unfolded it on the table between us.
She read it once.
Then she read it again, slowly, with one finger pressed against the paper like she needed to feel that it was real.
When she looked up, her eyes were wet but her voice didn't break.
"I looked for you," she said.
"For years.
Every agency, every record I could access.
They all said the same thing.
Baby d\*ed during transfer.
Case closed."
"She sealed it," I said.
"Somehow she sealed the record."
"She had a husband with money and connections." Cecelia's voice was quiet.
Factual.
Like she had long ago made peace with the shape of what had happened, even without knowing the full truth of it.
"I had nothing.
Not even grief people believed in, because they thought I had given you up willingly."
I looked at the photograph on the refrigerator.
The newborn in the yellow blanket.
The birthmark clearly visible.
"You kept that up all this time."
"Every day." She didn't look away from me.
"I never stopped believing you were somewhere.
I don't know why.
I had no evidence.
But I never stopped."
A sound came out of me that I hadn't planned.
Not quite a word.
I pressed my hands flat on the table.
She reached across and covered my left hand with both of hers.
She didn't say anything.
She just held on.
We sat like that for a long time.
Then her phone rang on the counter.
She didn't move to answer it.
It stopped.
Then it rang again immediately.
She glanced at the screen.
Her expression changed.
"That's a number I don't recognize," she said.
"But the area code — "
She held the phone toward me so I could see it.
May you like
It was my home number.
---
