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There’s a long pause. Then, “You’ve been ducking your mother’s calls.”
I say nothing.
“I know you’re busy,” Gene says. “But that’s not right. She’s worried, and I keep saying you’re busy with this nonsense of a new town, but you’re hurting her.”
I stiffen, once at the wordnonsenseand again at the accusation.
“I didn’t call to talk about that,” I say. “I called to talk about you. When they were tearing down Rockton, someone found letters from my birth mother.”
Silence.
More silence.
“Where?” he asks.
“Is that really your question?Where?” I bite back my temper. Keep calm. That’s the only way I’m getting through this call.
“You want to know if it’s true,” he says. “What she accused me of.”
“No, I want to know whether you told Katherine.”
“Katherine? You mean yourmother?”
I ignore that. “What story did you tell her?”
“I didn’t tell her a story, Eric. I told her the truth, which is exactly what I’ve told you and everyone else. I found you wandering around the forest. No sign of your parents. No sign of anyone. Some people shouldn’t have children—”
“Stop.”
“Please tell me you don’t believe the nonsense in that letter. About them asking me for help? Coming to find you? It was all a show. Money. That’s what they wanted. Payment.”
“I saw nothing like that.”
“Of course not. The demand would have come later. I nipped it in the bud.”
I close my eyes and let the rage roll through me until I’m calm enough to continue.
“So what you told me and everyone in Rockton,” I say. “That’s what you told Katherine.”
“Of course. Because it’s the truth.”
“And she never suspected—”
“What was there to suspect?” he snaps. “I did the right thing. We loved you. We still love you. You’re our son.”
That word is like a lash, and it takes everything in me not to snarl back,I am not your fucking son. I’mtheirson.
Instead, I focus on Katherine. If she was innocent in this, if she believed his lies, then I can admit that she did raise me as a son. I might have started out as a replacement for their dead child, but she loved me for myself and raised me with all the care and kindness I’d known with my birth mother.
“Why did you keep the letters?” I say.
“In case she ever came for you. I needed to prove how unhinged she was, how delusional.”
I think of those letters. Those articulate letters, the first so calm and reasonable, and even the second, restrained, the anguish only coming through between the lines.
The words of an unhinged and delusional woman? I can’t even stretch my brain to see how he’d interpret that. Casey and Jacob read them and saw none of that, either. But Gene did because it’s what he wanted and needed to see. He fooled everyone in Rockton, and he brainwashed me, but he’d fooled and brainwashed himself, too.
“I don’t ever want to see you again,” I say, as calmly as I can manage, channeling my birth mother’s restraint from those letters. “This isn’t me having a temper tantrum. It’s not me being pissy. I’ve been on the road to this truth for years now, and these letters were the final piece I needed.”
