She did not answer. That was an answer.
Tyler was looking from one to the other of them with an expression Eric had never seen on his son's face before, as if he were watching a building he had lived in his whole life come apart floor by floor. He was sixteen. He was six feet tall and had a driver's license barely three months old and an after-school job bagging groceries and a girlfriend he refused to talk about, and in that moment he looked about eight years old.
"Did he know?" Tyler asked. "This Daniel guy. Does he know about me?"
"He…" Melissa pressed the heel of her hand to her mouth. "He asked me once. A long time ago. I told him no. I told him you were your dad's."
"So you lied to him too."
"Tyler…"
"Stop saying my name like that." He was shaking. "Stop saying it like I'm the one who did something."
Eric put the phone down on the counter, very gently, next to the tray of sliced tomatoes. He found that his hands were steady, which surprised him. Everything inside him had gone very cold and very clear, the way it had gone once, years ago, on a highway, in the half-second after a tire blew and before he wrestled the car onto the shoulder. He looked at his son. Tyler's hair, dark brown, almost black, which Carol had always said came from her own father, who had been black Irish, whatever that meant. Tyler's eyes, which were brown. Not blue like Eric's. Not green like Melissa's. Brown. A recessive trait, two blue-eyed parents, almost never, Ms. Okafor would have said, though almost never is not the same as never. Eric had never once thought about it. He had looked into those brown eyes ten thousand times, and he had never once thought about it.