"His name is Daniel Reyes," she said. "I knew him in high school, in Tucson. We were friends. He was…" She shook her head. "It was a long time ago. Before you were born. Your dad and I weren't together then. Not really. We were apart for a while, that summer."
"Apart," Eric said. The word was strange in his mouth. "Apart. You mean the summer you went to Jenna's."
She nodded.
He did the arithmetic then, standing in his kitchen. It was the arithmetic he understood, later, that he had always been careful never to do. The summer of 2009. July and August. Melissa at her sister's in Tucson for nine weeks while he stayed in the apartment in Tempe with the hole in the drywall and the empty bottles and the phone he kept picking up and putting down. The night in late August when he drove down I-10 forty days sober with a gas-station bouquet on the passenger seat and stood on Jenna's porch until Melissa came out. The drive home together the next morning. The pregnancy test in October, the two pink lines, the way she had cried and he had thought it was happiness. The baby in April. Early, the doctors had said. A little early, but healthy, a good weight, nothing to worry about.
A little early.
"You knew," he said. "When he was born. You knew."
"I didn't know." She looked up at him, and her face was wrecked. "Eric, I swear to God, I didn't know. It could have been either… it could have been you. I thought it was you. I wanted it to be you. I told myself…"
"But you wondered."