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He turned on her, suppressed anger now boiling up. “My girlfriend? Like we’re talking about someone I dated? Like some girl I took to a movie?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Tell me. Tell me why.”
Connie looked around, spotted the pitcher of water, and poured a trembling cup. “This isn’t going to put me in a very good light.”
Sam said nothing. He had waited so long to find out. Since the first surprise realization that he and Caine were brothers. Fraternal twins, born just minutes apart.
“There was . . . There were . . .” She took a sip, shook her head slightly, trying to get up the nerve, unwilling to look at him. “I was married. I was not faithful.”
Sam blinked. “Caine and I were born at the same time.”
“Yes. Yes. There was my husband. He worked at the power plant. He was a very intelligent man. Very . . . good-looking, kind, decent. But I was young, and I wasn’t very smart about such things. I had an affair with a very different man. He was exciting. He was . . . forgive me . . . sexy.”
Sam winced. The images this conversation was calling up were not ones he wanted to see. He was suppressing enough; he didn’t need more.
“So there was my husband, and the other man. And when I realized I was pregnant, I also realized either of them might have been your father, or David’s.”
“David?”
“Caine. His adoptive parents gave him the name Caine. To me he was David. When your—when my husband died . . . when he was killed . . .”
“Mom. Did he die in the power plant?”
She nodded. “The meteor strike.”
Sam looked at her. She tried to meet his gaze and decided instead to drink more water. Sam hesitated. Did he want to know? What good would it do?
“Why did you give Caine up? David. Whatever you called him.”
“Maybe it was some kind of postpartum depression. I mean, I didn’t think so, but maybe it was depression. Some kind of delusional state . . .”
Sam waited.
“He was evil. Sam, that’s what he seemed to me. He was a beautiful baby. But . . . but I could feel something . . . some connection to a terrible darkness. He scared me. I worried I might hurt him.”
“It was your husband who died in the meteor strike,” Sam said, carefully not using the word “father.” “The man I knew as Dad.”
“Yes.”
One question remained.
“Tell me this,” S
am said, looking past her, out the window at the Southern California sun. “Caine and I don’t look much alike. One of us must have looked more like your husband. And one of us must have looked more like the other man.”
Connie Temple swallowed hard. She looked strangely young and vulnerable to Sam. He could almost see a teen mother there.
“David . . . Caine . . . was the spitting image of my husband.”
“Okay,” he said, feeling deflated.
“But it’s not that simple,” Connie said.
It was purely by accident that Edilio Escobar happened to see the TV report of a boy found wandering in the burned-out forest of the FAYZ.
He was eating. He’d been eating more or less without stop, because he couldn’t focus on anything else, couldn’t think about the future, or even tomorrow. He couldn’t talk to his parents. His mother just cried a lot, and his father, well, his father didn’t really want to know. His father had work. His father was not ready for stories of his son’s life.
