Sarah looked at Silas.
He said nothing.
This truth belonged to her.
Sarah took several breaths through the oxygen.
“Your father was born Elias Cole.”
Toby looked toward Silas.
“Cole?”
Silas nodded once.
“My brother.”
Toby stared.
The room seemed suddenly too small.
“My dad was your brother?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re…”
Silas’s voice softened.
“Your uncle.”
Toby looked at his mother.
“You said Dad didn’t have family.”
Sarah cried harder.
“I said what he asked me to say.”
Silas leaned forward.
“And now I need to know why.”
Sarah wiped her cheeks.
“It started long before Toby.”
She looked toward the lighter.
“Elias disappeared from you in 1973.”
Silas’s eyes narrowed.
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know him then.”
Silas frowned.
Sarah continued.
“That’s what you never knew.”
The room became quiet.
“I met Richard Harris in late 1977.”
Silas stared.
“He’d already been gone from the club almost five years.”
“Yes.”
Sarah looked toward the window.
“He was working at an auto shop outside town. He rented a room behind the shop. He kept to himself.”
She smiled weakly through tears.
“I was a waitress. He came in every morning at six-fifteen.”
Silas looked down.
“That sounds like Elias.”
“Black coffee. Eggs. Toast. Never anything else.”
“Hot sauce?”
Sarah stared at him.
“On the eggs.”
Silas almost laughed.
Instead his eyes filled.
Sarah continued.
“For months, I thought he was just a quiet mechanic.”
“When did he tell you?”
“After I got pregnant.”
Toby lowered his eyes.
Sarah looked at him.
“It wasn’t planned, sweetheart.”
Toby said nothing.
Sarah turned back to Silas.
“The night I told him, he left.”
Silas’s face hardened.
Sarah held up a trembling hand.
“For three hours.”
The hardness eased slightly.
“He came back around midnight and told me everything.”
“Everything?”
“Enough.”
“Did he tell you why he left us?”
Sarah nodded.
Silas’s breathing changed.
He had waited fifteen years for an answer.
Sarah spoke carefully.
“By 1973, he was tired.”
Silas laughed once without humor.
“Everybody gets tired.”
“He was scared of what he was becoming.”
Silas looked at her sharply.
“He told me there were things he had done that he couldn’t take back.”
Sarah did not describe them.
She did not need to.
“He said every year the club demanded more. More loyalty. More retaliation. More risk. He was watching men he loved disappear into prisons, hospitals, and graves.”
Silas looked away.
“He said you were younger.”
“I was twenty-one.”
“He worried about you.”
Silas’s mouth tightened.
Sarah continued.
“He wanted you to leave with him.”
Silas turned back.
“What?”
“He planned to ask.”
Silas stared.