The Morning After
Chapter 04 - The Morning After
By sunrise, my canceled wedding had become national entertainment.
A blurry video of Noah walking down the aisle had been viewed more than six million times. Reporters waited outside my townhouse. Commentators who had never met me discussed my judgment. Strangers called Vanessa a monster. Other strangers called Noah a scammer.
I hated all of them.
A ten-year-old boy had become content before anyone had asked whether he was safe.
Noah was not at my house.
That mattered.
The night before, after a frantic hour of calls, a county social worker named Erica Lawson had arrived at the hotel. She already knew him. Noah had left his licensed group home after learning about the wedding from a newspaper photo.
He had taken two buses across the city.
Alone.
I asked Erica if he would be punished.
“No,” she said. “But we need to understand how he got out without anyone noticing.”
Before she took him, Noah looked at me.
“Are you still going to marry her?”
“No.”
He studied my face as if testing the answer.
Then he nodded.
Lily had not slept.
She sat at the kitchen island in the ivory dress she had refused to take off.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Did Vanessa really forget she had a son?”
I set down my coffee.
“I don’t know.”
Lily stared at the marble countertop.
“Can moms forget?”
The question cut straight through me.
Her own mother, Caroline, had died when Lily was four. For years I had tried to make death feel different from abandonment.
Now the woman I had chosen to bring into our home had made those two fears collide.
“No,” I said carefully. “People can run from what they did. They can lie about it. They can pretend it happened to somebody else. But I don’t think you forget your child.”
Lily nodded.
Then she asked the question I had been dreading.
“If she could leave Noah, could she have left me?”
I had no answer that would make a child feel safe.
My phone rang.
Vanessa.
I declined it.
A minute later, a message appeared.
YOU NEED TO HEAR THE WHOLE STORY BEFORE YOU DESTROY BOTH OUR LIVES.
Then another.
ASK MARK WHAT HE KNEW.
I stared at the screen.
May you like
Mark Ellis had been my closest friend for twenty-three years.
He was also the man who had introduced me to Vanessa.
