“They told Rachel that you had abandoned her and the baby.”
Mark stumbled backward as though someone had struck him.
Suddenly, all of his behavior over the years began to make sense.
Every disappointment.
Every long stare at fathers with their sons.
Every time he had insisted, “This time it’ll be a boy.”
He hadn’t simply wanted a son.
He had been trying to replace something he believed he had lost forever.
But there was still something I didn’t understand.
“If you believed Tyler was dead, why did you never tell me about him?”
Mark sat down and covered his face with his hands.
“Because I couldn’t even say his name out loud. I blamed myself for years. I thought that if I had been older, if I’d had more money, if I had been able to protect Rachel better… maybe he would have lived.”
I was about to say something when I noticed that Helen still looked nervous.
It wasn’t just guilt on her face.
She looked afraid of something else.
“Helen,” I said. “That isn’t the whole story, is it?”
She looked at me.
Mark turned toward her too.
“Mom.”
Helen slowly opened her purse and pulled out a brown envelope.
“I received this three weeks ago.”
Mark took the envelope.
His name was written across the front.
“Who sent it?”
Helen remained silent.
“Mom, who sent it?”
“Tyler.”
The envelope nearly slipped from Mark’s hand.
“He… knows about me?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve known for three weeks and said nothing to me?”
“I wanted to make sure…”
“Make sure of what?”
Helen began crying again.
“That he really was Tyler.”
Mark tore open the envelope.
Inside was a photograph.
The moment I saw it, I didn’t need a DNA test.
The boy in the picture looked about seventeen. He had dark hair, brown eyes, and the exact same smile as Mark.
Even the slight way he tilted his head looked like my husband.
