I looked up at her. “This is fake. Claire, this isn’t real.”
“I know that now too.”
She told me how Owen had started asking his own questions recently. He’d found an old hospital photo — Derek sitting in a chair, holding two newborns wrapped in matching blankets. When Owen asked about it, Derek told him one baby belonged to a cousin. Later, the story changed. Eventually Derek settled on telling Owen that he and Ethan shared a father but had different mothers.
Owen believed it, the way kids believe whatever version of the truth the adults around them hand over. That was why he kept trying to sit near Ethan, kept insisting on the word “brother” — some part of him already knew there was a real connection there. He just didn’t understand what it actually was.
That weekend, Claire and I laid everything out on my kitchen table. I brought my medical records. She brought old messages and emails. She showed me the photograph again — Derek, two babies, matching blankets — and it wiped out the last excuse I’d been quietly building for him in my head.
