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We named him Xavier.
“Wait,what?” I squeaked into the night.
The apartment didn’t answer. No one did, to the point where I thought I might have imagined what I’d just read.
Masumi, it said. Not M. And Henry had referred to himselfas a father.
I read the passage again. Then read it again. And read it again.
And then, finally, I kept reading.
I shouldn’t be writing all of this down, I know. God knows it could ruin everything if anyone ever finds it. But I can’t shake the idea that the boy may never really know who he is. That he had a father who truly loved him.
Masumi was in love with Rupert. That much was never a lie. Poor girl never had a chance, of course. She was a plaything like everyone else in his path.
In the end, it was as much my fault as it was hers. She wanted to make him jealous by taking up with his brother—she knew him well enough for that, at least. Rupert never has liked to come second in anything, even with the assistant cook.
And I took advantage. I was so desperately in love with her myself. I was willing to take scraps.
I offered to marry her when she learned she was pregnant. Of course, I did. I’m not a monster.
She refused until I brought her back to Japan, and her parents refused to take her in. She was a rebel already, having left Japan against their wishes to come to England on her own. Even more for deciding to have the child.
Why should she settle now and marry a second son she could never love? When she has no other options for respectability, I suppose. In the end, though, I convinced her it was for the best, even if it was on paper only. Insurance for the child. And for her, though she’d never accept it.
She’s already told me she regrets it. That she won’t stay in Kendal.
I shan’t give her the divorce she wants, though, even if she refuses to have anything to do with me.
Xavier, after all, needs a father.
Xavier. Good lord.
I have a son.
“Insurance?” I murmured. “Insurance for what?”
Eagerly, I paged forward.
The entries were shorter and further apart than the original journals. There were months between them—sometimes years—before he had anything more to say, providing a narrative that moved quickly through Xavier’s life. Sometimes they lasted a while, Henry bemoaning his frustrations with Masumi’s distance and the fact that she wouldn’t let him see Xavier more often. Others were more like addendums to the original journals that covered the day-to-day life of Kendal, filling in the backstory of things that couldn’t be recorded for public knowledge.
It was as if Henry couldn’t help it—he had to add the corrections somewhere to the official record for someone’s sake. For Xavier’s, it appeared. It was as if he knew at some point his son would be lost in an identity crisis of his making and would need the truth more than anything else.
I read on through the night, plowing through the first journal, then the second, until the sun was starting to peek over the buildings of East London. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, feeling like I’d just passed through a hurricane.
The entire story was utterly unbelievable. It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t.
But it was.
And Xavier had no idea.
Just after I finished the final page, written just after Xavier’s nineteenth birthday, I sprang from the couch, clutching both journals as I raced to the bedroom and jumped into bed.
“Xavi,” I said, grabbing his shoulder to shake him awake. “Xavi, wake up!”
“Mmmph,” he grunted and rolled onto his side.
“No, you stubborn man.” I yanked harder on his arm. “Xavier, get up! You need to get upright now!”
