“I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
“I brought my daughter to work because I had no babysitter. Twenty minutes later, I learned her father may have been your missing brother living under a false name. I’m allowed to be a little unsettled.”
“Yes,” he said. “You are.”
There was no argument in his tone.
That made it harder to stay angry.
Daniel rose.
“I need photographs.”
I stiffened.
“Of Lily?”
“Of Caleb, if you have any.”
I looked down.
“I deleted most of them.”
Ethan’s expression shifted.
“Why?”
“Because he left.”
The answer came too quickly.
The real answer was more painful.
I had deleted them during the final month of my pregnancy, when every image felt like proof that I had mistaken hope for permanence.
“But I kept one,” I admitted.
I took out my phone.
The photograph was buried in a hidden folder I had not opened since Lily’s birth.
Caleb stood beside the lakefront, wind lifting his dark hair. He was laughing at something I had said. One hand covered half his face, but there was no mistaking him.
I passed the phone to Ethan.
The change in him was immediate.
His shoulders lowered.
His eyes became glassy.
He touched the screen with his thumb, enlarging Caleb’s face.
“That’s him,” he whispered.
Daniel stepped beside him.
For the first time since entering the room, Daniel lost his professional calm.
“My God.”
Ethan looked at the date beneath the photograph.
“This was taken five months after he disappeared.”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Near Montrose Harbor.”
Ethan returned the phone with both hands.
He looked older than he had an hour earlier.
Not weak.
Not defeated.
Simply human.
Daniel asked me to send him the photograph. I did.
Then he stepped into the hallway to make a call.
Ethan and I remained with Lily.
“She has his eyes,” he said.
I looked at my daughter.
“Everyone says she has mine.”
“She has your smile.”
“You’ve seen her smile once.”
“It was enough.”
Despite everything, a faint laugh escaped me.
Ethan’s mouth almost curved.
It disappeared quickly, but I had seen it.
Lily held out a cracker to him.
He accepted it solemnly.
She watched until he took a bite.
“You don’t have to eat it,” I said.
“It appears to be a condition of the gift.”
“She is demanding.”
“So was Caleb.”
The tenderness in his voice made my chest ache.
“What was he like?” I asked.
Ethan looked at the cracker in his hand.
“Restless. Funny when he forgot to be angry. He collected records he never played and bought books he rarely finished. He could make friends in elevators.”
“That sounds like him.”
“He hated silence.”
“He slept with the radio on.”
Ethan looked at me sharply.
“What station?”
“Old country music.”
A real smile appeared then.
Small, sad, unmistakable.
“Our mother loved country music. Caleb pretended to hate it until she died. Then he listened to it every night.”
The man I knew and the man Ethan remembered moved closer together.
For the first time, I could see Caleb as both.
Not a stranger who had lied to me.
Not only a missing brother.
A complicated man carrying a past he had never learned to name.
“Why didn’t he tell me?” I asked.
Ethan’s smile faded.
“I don’t know.”
“He could have trusted me.”
“Yes.”
“He knew I loved him.”
Ethan looked at me.
“Maybe that was why he was afraid.”
I wanted to reject the idea.
Instead, I remembered the nights Caleb had nearly told me something.
He would sit at my kitchen table long after dinner, turning a coffee mug between his hands. Sometimes he opened his mouth, then changed the subject. Once he asked whether I believed a person could start over without explaining the life they had left.
I had thought he meant old mistakes.
I had kissed his forehead and said everyone deserved a second chance.
He had held me for a long time afterward.
Daniel returned.
“I spoke to a contact with the police department. We need to proceed carefully. Caleb’s case is technically still open.”
“Technically?” Ethan asked.
“There have been no leads in nearly two years.”
“There is one now.”
Daniel nodded toward Lily.
“She is not evidence,” I said.
“No,” Daniel replied. “But her existence may give us a timeline.”
Ethan moved closer to me.
“We won’t do anything without your agreement.”
I looked at him.
“You sent for security without my agreement.”
“And I should have told you first.”
The apology surprised me.
Ethan Callahan did not look like a man accustomed to admitting mistakes.
Daniel seemed equally surprised, though he hid it quickly.
“What do you need?” I asked.
“A DNA test would establish whether Lily is Caleb’s daughter.”
My instinct was immediate.
“No.”
Ethan’s face remained still.
Daniel waited.
I stood and shifted Lily onto my hip.
“I don’t know either of you. Not really. This morning, I was an employee you probably passed in the hall without seeing. Now you want my daughter’s DNA.”
“You’re right,” Ethan said.
I blinked.
“That’s it?”
“What would you prefer me to say?”
“I expected you to insist.”
“I won’t.”
Daniel folded his arms.
“Ethan.”
“She said no.”
Their eyes met.
Something passed between them—an old disagreement, perhaps. Daniel looked away first.
“We can begin elsewhere,” he said. “The auto shop. The apartment. The vehicle.”
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
“No,” Ethan replied.
I felt my anger rise again.
“You just said you wouldn’t insist.”
“On the DNA test. Not on sending you into a situation we don’t understand.”
“It was my life.”
“And someone constructed it around a false identity.”
“That makes me the person most likely to recognize what matters.”
He opened his mouth, then stopped.
Daniel looked between us.
“She has a point.”
Ethan’s jaw tightened.
“Of course you think that.”