Page 133 of Roadrunner

“No.”

“Then there’s no easy version,” he said. “There’s just the honest one and the other one.”

I looked at him. Something hard had come into his face, something I recognized from years ago, from a bedroom doorway with a gun in his hand and my father standing in it.

“You’re angry,” I said.

“I’m not angry at you.”

“At him?”

“At the position,” Riley said. “At a rich man who gets to hand out trust funds and call it love and never once has to sit in a room and wonder if the kid he’s handing it to is really his to love in the first place.” He exhaled, long and controlled, the way he did when he was working to keep something from getting away from him. “That’s not fair to him. I know that. I’m saying it anyway.”

“He held my hand at the funeral,” I said quietly. “He didn’t have to do that.”

“I know.”

“He’s not a villain, Riley.”

“I know that too.” He looked at me. “Doesn’t mean it won’t cost you something to be honest with him. Doesn’t mean it won’t cost Arthur something. I’d just rather it cost us now, honestly, than cost us later, when he finds out some other way and wonders what else you decided he didn’t need to know.”

I was not going to do that again. Not to Robert. Not to anyone.

“I’ll call him Friday,” I said.

“Want me there?”

“No,” I said. “This one’s mine to do.”

He nodded, and didn’t argue it, which was its own kind of support.

I flew to California instead of calling. Some things don’t belong on a telephone, and this was one of them, and I understood by then that I owed Robert MacAfee better than a phone call for something this large.

He met me at a restaurant I didn’t recognize, near the hospital that carried his name on a bronze plaque the size of a door. He stood when I came in, the way men of his generation still did, and he looked, for the first time since I’d known him, uncertain.

“You didn’t come all this way for paperwork,” he said.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

I told him. The hotel I didn’t remember. The notebook in the locked drawer. The DNA result that had come back, eleven years too late, at 99.9998 percent. Arthur wasn’t Joshua’s.

I watched a man who had spent forty years delivering hard truths to other people receive one of his own.

He didn’t say anything for a long time. He looked at the table. He looked at his hands, which were spotted with age and folded very carefully in front of him, like a man holding something together by force of posture alone.

“I feel as though our relationship started with a lie,” I said. “A night in a hotel I’ll never remember. Or fully understand.”

Shame washed over him. “He never told me.”

“I’m telling you now because you’re setting up a trust based on something that isn’t true, and I couldn’t let you do that without knowing.”

Robert MacAfee looked at me with an expression I had never seen on him, not even at the funeral, not even in the hospital hallway with a tube in his son’s throat.

“The test says what it says.”

He looked past me like Arthur might be in the doorway.

“I loved him every other Sunday. That part doesn’t change because a lab learned how to spell.”