He looked at Lauren over the boy’s head.
“Is it true?”
She nodded. Once. The ponytail moved. Her eyes were wet and furious at themselves for it.
“He is my son,” she said. “I had him when I was nineteen. My parents adopted him. They raised him as my brother. I let them. I let you. I let everybody. His name is Jonah Brennan. He is twenty. He is in this airport, at the other end of the hall, waiting for me to bring Mason, and he has a one-way ticket because my father fell and Claire says someone has to be in the house, and I was going to fly down with both of them and come back and tell you in our kitchen like a coward who had already done the hard part somewhere else. That is the seat. That is the whole ugly thing. I am so sorry. I am not having an affair. I am worse than that, probably. I built a life with you out of a sentence I wouldn’t say.”
Derek heard every word. They went into him and sat down in separate chairs and did not yet make a picture. Twenty. Nineteen. Adopted. Brother. Son. The extra seat. Mason’s small back under his hand. The return column with two names and a blank where a father might have been if anyone had thought to put him there.
He could have asked a hundred questions. The one that came out was the one Mason had already paid for.