Part 2
—”Are you my dad?” The boy’s voice dropped from the stairs like a stone falling into still water.
Claire closed her eyes. Thomas took a step toward the children, but Matthew was already staring at me with that clean curiosity that only children possess before adults contaminate their questions. Lucy remained hidden behind her mother’s leg, clutching a cloth doll. I held the letter in my hand, my supposed signature at the bottom, the signature that, according to that piece of paper, had renounced them before they were even born. I wanted to say yes. I wanted to kneel, hug them, beg for forgiveness with the desperation of a man who understands too late. But Claire stood in front of me and said:
—”Don’t answer. You have no right to enter their lives with a word you never carried.”
Matthew frowned.
—”Mom, is he?”
Claire took a deep breath.
—”He is someone we have to get to know slowly.”
That was more than I deserved.
Thomas took the kids to the living room with a calmness that hurt me. He talked to them about a game, warm milk, putting on pajamas. He didn’t just look at me as an enemy. He looked at me the way one looks at a danger that arrives without knowing it is one. Claire opened the door wider, not to invite me in like before, but so I would stop standing under the porch light looking like a ghost.
—”Five minutes,” she said. “Not one more.”
I entered the house where my children had learned to walk without me. There were drawings stuck on the fridge, tiny shoes by the entrance, a photo of Claire with the twins in a park. I also saw another photo, more discreet, on a shelf: Claire in a hospital bed, pale, holding two tiny babies, and Thomas next to her carrying a diaper bag. Not as a husband. As a witness. As someone who was where I should have been.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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