Chapter 9: The Boy Who Was Never Mine

I left the waiting room and took the back stairs down.

On the second landing I sat on a concrete step with my elbows on my knees.

I still had the boy's drawings in my head, and the sound of his shoes by my door.

I had died three nights after losing him, and I had never stopped being his father.

Now I knew she had taken him from me twice.

He had never been mine to lose.

I put my face in my hands.

Nobody was on that stairwell. It was cold, and it smelled of rust and bleach, and I cried harder than I had at his funeral.

Then I stopped, because there was a man in the world who had a son and didn't know it.

I washed my face in a men's room and found the garage.

Rex was leaning against a concrete pillar next to Sabine's father's car, lighting a cigarette with hands that wouldn't hold still.

He had gone out before the family had finished arguing.

"You can't smoke here," I said.

"Watch me."

He looked ten years older than he had in the parlor. His eyes went over my shoulder, checking for the Thorpes.

"They're upstairs," I said.

"What do you want?"

"You know what I want. You counted it in that room."

He dragged on the cigarette.

"It's your kid," Rex said. "She said it's your kid."

"I was in Singapore for two weeks, and you were on the Cape with her. I paid for the cottage. It's in your expense report."

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