He said, “Dad, I need to tell you something and I need you to let me finish.”
He told me Grady had contacted him in December. He told me he’d read everything and answered nothing for eight weeks.
And then he said, “I invited him to the game tomorrow. He’s coming. Please try to understand.”
I want to describe what that did and I’m not sure I can.
Fourteen years. Every single day of them.
And I said, “Okay.”
That’s what I said. I said okay and I asked if he wanted eggs in the morning.
Then he went to bed and I lay there until about four, and at some point I got up and stood in the kitchen in the dark for a while like an idiot.
Because here’s the thing I had always known and never once said out loud, including to my mother, including to Neve, including to anybody.
He is not mine. Not in the way that people mean. I got him because a man walked out of a house at some point between 2 a.m. and 7 a.m. on the twentieth of March, 2012.
And if that man ever came back with money and a good suit and a story, I had absolutely no idea what a boy would do with that.
