The first doctor telling Robin and me that children sometimes went through strange phases.
“Do you remember the doctor you took her to?”
“Of course.”
I remembered his office.
The fish tank.
Him telling me that nothing he’d seen suggested we should panic.
I remembered Robin squeezing my hand afterward and saying, “Maybe he’s right. Maybe we’re frightening ourselves.”
Andrew looked at the floor.
“His first name was Thomas.”
I stared at him.
Andrew had his mother’s last name. I’d never had a reason to connect him to the doctor we’d seen thirteen years before we met Andrew.
“No.”
“Christie.”
“No.”
“He was my father,” Andrew said.
For several seconds, I heard nothing except Amanda laughing in the next room.
Then I said, “Your father treated my daughter?”
“Yes.”
“The doctor who told us she wasn’t seriously ill?”
Andrew nodded.
“You knew?”
“Yes.”
