Page 110 of Roadrunner

Not all of it. Not yet. I told him about the test. I told him Della had suggested it after noticing certain things. I told him the result.

We were on the back porch. The desert evening cooling around us. The stars beginning their business above the mountain line.

He didn’t say anything when I told him.

Not immediately.

He sat very still in the way he sat still when something landed that required real processing. Not the surface kind. The deep kind. The kind that goes all the way down and finds things that have been there for a long time waiting for exactly this.

I watched his face.

His jaw tightened once.

He pressed his lips together.

His eyes went to the mountains and stayed there.

“Riley,” I said.

He shook his head once. Small. Not at me. At something internal.

Then he put his face in his hands.

He didn’t make a sound. His shoulders didn’t shake. He sat forward with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands and he was completely still.

I put my hand on his back.

He stayed like that for a moment.

Then he sat up.

His eyes were wet. Just at the edges. He looked at the mountains and blinked once and the rest of it he kept. That was his way. Feeling things fully and keeping most of it private and only showing what he decided to show.

He’d decided to show me this much.

That meant everything.

“He’s eleven,” he said.

“Almost,” I said.

He looked at his hands. “I’ve missed years.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t know,” he said. “If I’d known—”

“I know,” I said. “I know that.”

He looked at me. His eyes steady now. “You thought he was Joshua’s?”

“I didn’t know what I thought,” I said. “I was scared and I made the wrong choice and I have lived with that every single day since.” I held his gaze. “There is nothing I can say that is adequate. I know that.”

He looked at me for a long time.

“No,” he said. “There isn’t.”

It was honest. It was exactly right. And it was the kindest thing he could have said, because it was true and he said it without cruelty and then he let it sit and didn’t add to it.