The resemblance had been there the two times David met Connor, but context had protected him from seeing it. Sarah removed the context simply by standing beside her son. Megan looked between them. “Dad?”
David took one slow breath. “Connor,” he said, because for some reason the boy’s name was the only safe word he could locate. “How old are you exactly?” Connor blinked.
“Eighteen.” “What month were you born?” “Dad,” Megan said, sharper now. “What are you doing?”
Sarah closed her eyes for a second. Connor answered anyway. “November.” David felt the floor drop out beneath a date he had spent nineteen years refusing to calculate.
Sarah stepped farther into the foyer and closed the front door behind her with deliberate care. “We should not do this standing in the doorway,” she said. Megan’s face had gone pale. “Do what?”
Sarah looked at her son, and David understood that whatever she had hidden, she had not prepared to reveal it tonight. Connor was staring at her now with a new suspicion, the natural teenage sense that adults had crossed into a language they thought children could not hear. “Mom?” he asked. “What is happening?”
David put one hand on the back of the foyer chair because he needed contact with something solid. “Nineteen years ago,” he began, then stopped because every possible continuation threatened several lives at once. “Sarah and I knew each other.” “Knew each other how?” Megan asked.
Sarah’s eyes moved to David with something like warning. Not protect me, he realized. Protect them. It was the first generous instinct in the room.