“We made a coward’s decision.” “What decision?” “That unless there was a medical reason to know, we would leave it alone.” Mark stared at her. For eighteen years, two adults had treated his fatherhood like a sealed envelope they were entitled not to open.
“And you never reconsidered?” “Every year.” “That is not the same thing as doing something.” “I know.” “Did Andrew ever want to tell me?”
“Yes.” Mark’s heart thudded once, hard. “When?” “When Tyler was about four.” Then again when he was ten.
“And you stopped him?” Laura nodded. “Why?” “Because by then you were his father. You loved him.
He loved you.” Andrew said he didn’t want to destroy that. “Andrew doesn’t get credit for restraint after sleeping with his brother’s fiancée.” “I know.” “No, I don’t think you do.”
Mark finally sat on one of the kitchen stools because his knees had started to feel unreliable. He thought of every ordinary moment now infected by a second meaning. Andrew handing Tyler a baseball glove on his seventh birthday. Andrew paying for summer camp one year after Mark lost a major client. Andrew joking that Tyler had inherited the Whitmore tendency to argue.
Andrew standing near the back of the auditorium at Tyler’s middle-school graduation, wiping his eyes. It was unbearable precisely because none of those memories had been fake. Andrew had loved Tyler. Mark had loved Tyler. The lie existed alongside both truths, not instead of them.
“What did you tell Andrew when Tyler ordered the DNA kit?” Mark asked. Laura looked down. “You knew he ordered it?” “Yes.”
Mark stared. The kit had been a birthday gift from Tyler’s girlfriend, Madison, whose family had gotten obsessed with genealogy after tracing a great-grandmother to Ireland. Tyler had laughed about sending in saliva. Mark had joked that maybe the family would finally prove his grandfather’s story about Cherokee ancestry was nonsense. Laura had smiled too tightly at dinner that night, and Mark, fool that he now felt he had been trained to become, had missed it.
“You knew this was coming.” “Yes.” “Did you tell Andrew?” “Yes.” “And?”
“He said we had to tell you before the results came back.” Mark stood again. “And you didn’t.” “I kept waiting for the right time.” “There was no right time after year eighteen, Laura.
She cried harder.” Mark walked to the family-room doorway and looked at the sideboard photographs. There was Tyler at age three asleep on Mark’s chest after the zoo. Tyler at age nine wearing Mark’s old baseball cap. Tyler at fourteen holding a learner’s permit and grinning so wide his braces showed.