“And then you hid it from me?”
“Yes.”
Mark looked at Carol like she had become a stranger.
“Who is my father?”
Carol began to cry without sound. The tears simply fell down her cheeks.
David answered instead.
“I am.”
Mark threw the papers onto the foot of my bed.
“Don’t do that. Don’t stand there and play noble. The paper says you’re not.”
“The paper says I didn’t give you my blood,” David replied. “It doesn’t say I didn’t give you my life.”
For a moment, I saw the boy inside Mark—the boy who had learned to ride a bike in David’s driveway, who had been carried inside after falling asleep in the backseat, who had once believed parents were permanent and simple.
Then the boy vanished.
Mark turned on Carol.
“Did you cheat on him?”
Carol flinched as if he had slapped her.
“No.”
“Then how?”
David closed his eyes.
“We couldn’t have children. I couldn’t. We tried for years. Your mother wanted to adopt. I was proud and stupid and desperate. A doctor at the fertility clinic told us there were options.”
Mark’s face hardened.
“What options?”
Carol’s voice shook.
“Donor insemination.”
He stared at her.
“You mean some stranger?”
She nodded.
“But we chose it together,” David said. “At least, we thought we did. The clinic told us the donor was anonymous. Screened. Healthy. That was all we knew.”
Mark grabbed the birth certificate next. His hands shook now.
“My entire life,” he said. “My name, my family, everything—”
“Still yours,” David said.
Mark laughed again, but this time there was pain in it.
“You don’t get to decide that after lying to me for thirty-five years.”
“No,” David admitted. “I don’t.”
Carol stepped toward him.
“Mark, we loved you. We loved you from the moment we knew I was pregnant.”
He turned on her with a look I had never seen from him before.
“And because you loved me so much, you let me humiliate my wife in a delivery room?”
Carol sobbed.
“I tried to stop you.”
“You should have told me.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I should have.”
My phone vibrated against the bedside table. Rachel’s name flashed across the screen again, but I didn’t answer. I couldn’t look away from the scene unfolding at the foot of my bed.
Mark slowly turned to me.
For the first time since Lily was born, he looked ashamed.
But shame was not the same as apology.
He took one step toward me.
“I didn’t know.”
I stared at him.
“Didn’t know what? That secrets hurt? That accusations leave scars? That a baby can hear a father’s voice before she can understand his words?”