My heart beat hard as I reached up and took my hat off my head. I placed it gently on the table, and that was when I did it. That was when I looked at him.
He was standing back along the wall, his light-blue button-up shirt undone at the top. His dark hair wasn’t gelled down like usual; instead, it was standing up in several directions. He looked calm and collected with his hands tucked in his pockets, but I was certain he was fuming on the inside. My dad was a lot like Christian; they were blank canvases—you never had any idea what was going through their head.
“Why, son?”
A small piece of anger flashed throughout. “Son?” I turned away. “But I’m not actually your son.”
I heard him push off from the wall and scuffle toward me. “You are my son. Even if not biological.”
My nostrils flared as words began to claw up in my throat. The hold on my emotions was slipping. I knew this would happen eventually—that we’d have to have this talk, but for some reason, I wasn’t prepared.
“Did you know I found the birth certificate?”
I didn’t meet his eye, because from where I was sitting, I would have had to look up to him, and that didn’t seem fitting at a time like this.
He sniffed. “I had a hunch. That’s why I moved it.”
“So, who is my father, then? Because his name wasn’t listed.”
The chair in front of me screeched as it was pulled out. He sunk down in the seat and began rolling his cuffed sleeves up to his elbows. When I finally did gather the confidence to look at him, it was like looking into a mirror. For the first time in my entire life, we were the same. We were raw. There were no more lies, no more secrets. It was time. I could sense it. He had been in a similar situation a few months ago with Christian. But this time, he wasn’t going to hold back.
I asked again, this time keeping our gazes locked and loaded. “Who is my father?”
His eyes dipped away for a moment before they swooped back and pinned me to my seat. “My brother.”
My brows came together i
n an instant. “What?”
He sighed and ran his hand over his five o’clock shadow. “My brother is your father.”
My breathing halted. “You have a brother?”
What the hell is with people hiding their brothers?
“Had.” My father swallowed, and I heard the gulp from across the table. “I had a brother. He’s dead.”
A wide range of emotions flooded me, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly how I felt. It was a weird feeling finding out your father wasn’t really your father, but it was even weirder finding out that your father—who you’d never met—was dead.
That meant that, technically, both my parents were dead.
My hands came up and clasped together over my head. Nothing I wanted to say would come out of my mouth, which was probably a good thing. What was the right thing to say in this situation?
“He died right before you were born.”
My mouth opened, but then I quickly shut it, lowering my hands to the cold table.
“I felt wrong signing the birth certificate, because his death was so fresh in my mind. Things weren’t good with your mother and me, obviously, but I need you to understand something, Ollie.”
The word barely made it out of my mouth. “What?”
His blue eyes drove into me. “The second I laid eyes on you, I knew you were mine. I hated my brother for what he did, and I was angry with your mother, too, but that never, ever reflected onto you. You were my son then, and you are my son now. Do you hear me?”
The only thing I could do was nod. I nodded as my stomach tensed. I nodded as I squeezed my fists together. And I nodded as a million and one questions ran through my mind.
I needed to know the whole story, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know. My mom used to be the light of my life. Even when she’d overdosed, I still thought the world of her. Christian and I blamed the accident and the injuries for her sudden abuse of drugs. We thought—and were told—that she had gotten addicted to pain pills because of the injuries she sustained, but last year, we found out different.
That wasn’t the truth.