“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” he demands. “Why didn’t you tell me?” His face swings toward his mom.
“I should have,” Harper says quickly. “I didn’t know until a couple of weeks ago, I swear. I was scared?—”
“Did Z know?” Bruiser cuts in as he turns to look at me. “Did he know you were my dad?”
“Yes,” I answer, because we had decided to give him whatever truths he asked for. “He knew.”
Bruiser stands abruptly and begins pacing, his hands curling into fists at his sides.
“So he lied to me?” he says, his voice cracking. “My whole life, he lied?”
“He loved you—” Harper starts.
“Everyone keeps saying that!” Bruiser shouts, his voice shaking with anger. “But he lied!”
He points at Harper. “You lied!”
Then he points at me. “And you—were you just pretending to be nice to me this whole time?”
The accusation lands hard.
I stand because I need him to hear this.
“No,” I say firmly. “Never. I have loved you since the day I met you, Bruiser, from the very first moment I saw you.
“I didn’t know you were mine at first, and I didn’t know your mom was pregnant when we got separated all those years ago by things neither of us could control.
“But when I found out, everything made sense. You have your mom’s eyes and my stubborn streak. And the way you count things when you get nervous is something you got from me too. You’re my son, and you have always been my son.”
“Then why weren’t you there?” The question comes out broken, and it hits me harder than anything else has.
“Why did Z get to be my dad and you didn’t?”
I sink back onto the couch and brace my elbows on my knees, clasping my hands together as I look up at him.
He’s angry and hurting, and he deserves better than what he’s gotten.
I know enough to know things can get twisted in kids’ heads, too. I think about all the years I believed I wasn’t enough to keep my mom from getting sick, or to make Harper stay. How I wasn’t enough to be the person people chose.
Now I hear the question underneath what my own son is asking me, the same one that I asked a thousand times:was I not enough to stay for?
But I know now that it’s the wrong question.
“Because I didn’t know,” I say, and I let him see all of it: the regret and the truth of the words. “We got separated before your mom knew she was pregnant with you. By then, Z was already in your life, and I should have fought harder to clear up misunderstandings and be there from the beginning. That’s on me. I failed you, and I’m sorry.”
Bruiser is crying now, tears running freely down his face.
“He was my dad. I miss him so much.”
Harper moves toward him, and this time he doesn’t pull away. He lets her wrap her arms around him, and I watch her hold our son while memories press in on me. I think about every time she tried to run from me, and every time she thought loving me meant she would ruin me.
I remember the way she looked at me in that basement all those years ago when she said she wanted strings attached with me, as if it was something she was afraid to admit, almost apologizing for it.
Now we are here, building something out of everything that should have destroyed us.
There’s still so much we don’t know.
Like where the hell Silas is, if he’s still alive, or how the hell we can get him back.