Tell them it was a misunderstanding. Tell them you approved it. Dad, please. You can't put your own son in prison. This will destroy me.
I won't survive in there. He was crying without restraint. Loud, ragged sounds that moved through his whole frame. I'm your boy, Dad. You remember you took me to baseball games when I was little.
You carried me up on your shoulders. You love me. I know you do. Please don't do this. The entire room went still, holding its breath to see which way the old man would break, whether blood would run stronger than betrayal.
Something sharp moved through my chest. A pain I had no argument against. He wasn't wrong about what he was reaching for. The baseball games were real. The shoulders were real.
So was the day he entered the world and the promise I made to myself in that hospital room that I would put myself between him and anything that meant him harm. But I also held other memories. The windowless room they had selected for me. The forged medical report signatures that were never mine. What I had overheard at 2 in the morning.
his voice loose and pleased with itself, laying out the full scheme. The institution, my money, his beach, I looked at my son. I looked into his eyes and found that whoever had once lived behind them was gone. Whatever goodness the boy had carried had been swallowed whole by the man he'd elected to become. I moved closer to him.
I needed every word to reach him. I wanted what came next to be the thing he carried with him when that cell door closed. My face gave him nothing. My voice gave him less. I held him in my gaze for a long moment before I spoke.
You are confused, Declan. Something flickered across his face, hope, or the memory of it. What? What does that mean? I am not your father, I said quietly and with full intention.
He stared. "Dad, dad, what are you saying?" "My son died three months ago," I told him.
"He died the same day his mother did. The boy I raised would never have stripped his father of his home. The boy I raised would never have looked at a grieving man and seen only a problem that needed disposing of. The boy I raised had a conscience." I left it there.