“He’s going to be furious.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do,” he said, his voice cracking. “He’s my dad.”
That stopped me.
The boy in front of me was not evidence. He was not a clue. He was not a missing piece of my family that I could simply claim.
He was a child whose life I had just split open in a grocery store parking lot.
So I softened my voice.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know this is not your fault. But if he is my brother, then he left behind parents who never stopped waiting for him. My mother kept his room exactly the way he left it. My father still cannot drive past a navy suit in a store window without turning his head away.”
