Chapter 7
Lucas’s phone buzzed next. He looked at it, jaw tight, then placed it facedown beside the ketchup.
Noah dipped a fry, watched the red smear on the plate, and said, “He’ll make me look like I’m lying.”
Grace did not insult him with reassurance. Arthur would try. Of course he would.
“Yes,” she said.
Noah looked up.
“He will,” Grace continued. “He’ll say you want money. He’ll question Mara’s letter. He’ll question your record, if you have one. He’ll question your memory, your motives, your clothes, your timing. He’ll make me look unstable. He’ll make Lucas look manipulated. He’ll do it calmly.”
Lucas’s face tightened with each sentence.
Noah leaned back. “You’re not making this sound better.”
“I know.”
“Then why say it?”
“Because you already know what people do. Pretending otherwise would be another insult.”
Noah looked away first.
The waitress refilled Grace’s untouched coffee anyway. “Rough night?”
Lucas gave a laugh that startled all three of them. “Kind of.”
The waitress nodded as if this explained the gown, the boys, the rain, the visible ruin of an entire bloodline. “Pie’s half off after midnight.”
Noah said, “What kind?”
“Apple, cherry, something that claims to be blueberry.”
Noah glanced at Grace, then Lucas. “Apple?”
Lucas nodded. “Obviously apple.”
Grace said, “Three forks.”
Noah almost corrected her, almost said he had not asked to share, then let it go.
By morning, the scandal had begun.
Not because Grace had called the press. She did not have to. The hotel entrance had been full of eyes and phones and people who would rather die than be first to gossip but never second. A photograph appeared online before dawn: Grace in black satin on a wet sidewalk, Arthur behind her, Lucas staring at Noah, the open locket catching light between them.
By eight, the Whitman Foundation board requested a private emergency meeting.
By nine, Arthur’s attorney called Grace’s attorney.
By ten, Lucas came downstairs in yesterday’s shirt from the hotel suite Grace had rented under her own name because Noah still refused the apartment. Noah had taken the adjoining room only after checking the lock three times and wedging a chair under the handle. Grace had slept sitting upright on the sofa, not sleeping.
He opened his door at ten-fifteen, wearing hotel slippers and the same hoodie because he had refused the clothes Grace ordered.
“I’m not wearing rich-person mourning pajamas,” he said.
Lucas looked at the neatly folded cashmere sweater Grace had sent up. “That’s fair. They do look emotionally expensive.”
Noah’s mouth twitched.
Grace, who had been on the phone with a private lab, covered the receiver and looked at them. The sight was dangerous. Two boys in the doorway, one polished and shattered, one guarded and damp-haired from a too-long shower, both alive.
She turned back to the call before hope could make her foolish.
The DNA test took two days to rush and eighteen years to arrive.
During those two days, Arthur tried everything except the truth.
He issued a statement about an unstable young man exploiting a grieving family history. Grace issued none. He sent a mediator. Grace refused the meeting. He called Lucas until Lucas blocked him, then emailed a message with the subject line SON, PLEASE READ. Lucas read it and threw up in the hotel bathroom.
Noah saw him afterward and stood awkwardly near the sink while Lucas rinsed his mouth.
“You okay?” Noah asked.
Lucas wiped his face with a towel. “No.”
“Yeah,” Noah said. “Stupid question.”
“It was nice though.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“It kind of was.”
Noah leaned against the doorframe, uncomfortable with gratitude. “He wrote bad stuff?”
Lucas gave him the phone.
Noah read the email silently. Grace watched from the hall because she had come running at the sound of retching and did not know how to mother either son without crowding them.
Arthur had written that Lucas was being manipulated by Grace’s guilt and Noah’s opportunism. He had written that Lucas should remember who raised him, who protected him, who gave him his name.
Noah handed back the phone. His face was unreadable.
“Sorry,” he said.
Lucas laughed once, bitterly. “Why are you sorry?”
“Because if I hadn’t shown up—”
“Don’t,” Lucas said. Too sharp, then softer. “Don’t do that. I’ll get mad.”
Noah nodded, but the apology stayed in his shoulders.
That evening, Grace found Noah in the hotel hallway sitting on the carpet beside the ice machine. He said the room was too quiet. She sat across from him in her stocking feet because the hallway carpet was cleaner than some choices and dirtier than others.
For a while, neither spoke.
The ice machine groaned like an old animal.
Noah finally said, “Mara sang when she was scared.”
Grace turned her head.
“She had a terrible voice,” he said. “Like, people on the bus would move. But she sang old radio songs when bills came or when some guy followed us too long. After she got sick, she stopped. That’s when I knew she was really dying.”
Grace folded her hands in her lap so she would not reach for him.
“What did she sing?”
Noah stared at the carpet. “Mostly ‘Stand by Me.’ Wrong words half the time.”
Grace smiled faintly through the ache.
“My lullaby for Lucas was ‘You Are My Sunshine,’” she said. “But I only knew one verse, so I hummed the rest.”
Noah nodded. Then, after a moment, “Did you hum it for both of us?”
The question entered Grace quietly and destroyed her.
“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice broke. “I hope I did.”
Noah looked away, jaw working.
She wanted to apologize again, but apologies were beginning to feel like coins dropped into a well too deep to hear them land.
So she sat with him until the ice machine made another batch.
When the DNA results came, Grace did not open them first.
She placed the envelope on the diner table—the same diner, because Noah trusted it now in the limited way he trusted anything, by returning to it with an exit in mind. Lucas sat on one side. Noah on the other. Grace between them.
Arthur was not invited.
Noah stared at the envelope. “You open it.”
Lucas shook his head. “No. You.”
May you like
Noah looked irritated. “Why me?”
“Because you had less,” Lucas said.
