Then he turned to leave.
At the door, he stopped and looked back at me. “Same time Thursday?” he asked. “I’m on the schedule.”
I told him we’d see him Thursday.
He left.
The unit was quiet. The monitors beeped. Somewhere down the hall, a mother was singing something low and tuneless to her daughter.
Denise came and stood next to me.
“You know what gets me,” she said, not really asking. “He figured out how to give somebody else’s kid what he couldn’t give his own.”
She went back to the station.
I stood there another second.
Thursday. And After.
Wade came back Thursday.
And the Thursday after that.
Baby Boy Nolan was in our unit for six more weeks. In that time, Shelby Nolan returned twice, briefly, and we connected her with a social worker named Paulette who was good at the kind of quiet, patient work that doesn’t show up in any chart. That’s a longer story, and it belongs to Shelby, not to me.
