George kicked at the coffee table leg, jolting Finn. “News flash,” he said. “You weren’t good enough for Maribel’s love either.”
Finn shrank back into the leather of the couch cushion. With the force of George’s words came the routine gut punch of other memories. The genuine shock that would come on the sleepiest mornings upon waking to find Violet, long and lean where Maribel had been curvy and soft. The awful ways he’d tried to prod Violet out of being so easy and accommodating, longing for a flare of Maribel’s stubborn, strong will. The time Violet had looked up at him from his art desk and he’d had to run from the room, gasping, so sure had he been that it was Maribel sketching one of her beautiful vignettes there rather than Violet scribbling a meaningless shopping list.
Seeing that he’d hit his mark, George pressed on. “Thank God Maribel didn’t live to see you this way. She never would have agreed to marry you if she’d known you could be remotely like this. Self-indulgent. Selfish. Manipulative. Incapable of being happy with what you have, with what’s right in front of you. I might not have known Maribel that well, but I know enough to say with utmost certainty that’s not someone she would have related to—and it’s not someone the old Finn would have wanted to know either.”
Even in a rage, George still managed to speak articulately, smoothly, and shrewdly on point, as if he were overseeing a high-stakes business meeting, or taking his turn at the podium in a debate. He’d always been a hand talker, something they’d teased him about having inherited through some politician genetic code, but now each gesture seemed menacing as the gun clasped in his hand rose and fell with each phrase, catching the glow of the kitchen light. He began to pace the cracker-strewn floor. “When I first told you I wasn’t bothered by your friendship with Caitlin, I meant it,” he said. “For you to turn around and betray me that way—”
“How many ways do I have to tell you?” Finn was yelling now too, trying to block the words from his ears, to push the images from his brain, to regain control, to turn the focus. “I am not their father. You have it all wrong. I know who he is—” At that, George stopped midstride and snapped his head around to glare at Finn. “But you should hear that from Caitlin, not from me. Where is she?”
George didn’t answer.
Finn got to his feet, and the men stood eye to eye. “She loves you, you know,” Finn said. “Odds are you’d be happily raising your biological children together if you’d just gotten that stupid sperm count test. Why didn’t you get the test, George?”
George looked away.
“Oh my God. You knew you were going to fail, didn’t you?”
Silence.
“Well, aren’t we high and mighty, accusing me of not being worthy of my wife’s love.”
George turned his gaze back on Finn, and what Finn saw there made his blood run cold. He took a step back. “Look, we’ve all done things we’re not proud of—”
“Don’t put me in the same camp as you.” George was practically growling now.
“You’re right. I’m the worst offender, by miles. But of all the things I’m guilty of, you’re after me for the one thing I didn’t do.”
George shook his head. “Even if I believed you—which I don’t—you say you know who the father is. And all these years, you’ve watched me play the part, thinking I was some chump. Not saying a word.”
Finn nodded. “Just one question back at you. You seem to be quite taken with Violet’s unsuspecting role in all this. Why didn’t you tell her what you knew? Why didn’t you tell her about what happened with Maribel?”
George just stared.
“Exactly.” Finn knew he was pressing his luck, but he felt he had no choice but to risk it. “Caitlin will tell you I’m not the father. Tell me where she is. Is she getting the police? Is she getting Violet? Is Bear with her, or is he here, in the bedroom with the twins?”
George looked down at the gun in his hand curiously, as if someone else had put it there.
Finn felt defeat wash over him. All these agonizing nights of indecision, of looking for a way out, and now he knew that Violet had reached out and offered one. She would have let him return Bear and go. She would have let him disappear, no questions asked. She would have let him get away with it—with so much—at the cost of his son. At the cost of the only thing he had left.
Would he have taken her escape hatch and paid that price if he had the chance? Would he have given up Bear if it meant he could at least try to save himself? It didn’t matter now. Because George had trapped him here. And he could see that he wasn’t going to talk his way out of it. What he wanted was not on the table for discussion, nor would it be. He had lost. And he deserved to lose. He’d known that all along. George was right.
Finn turned and headed for the front door. Without the possibility of taking Bear with him, there was nothing keeping him here. George had gotten Violet’s message to let him go. George would return Bear to his rightful place. Finn would disappear into the kind of fugitive life that no one could take any pleasure in—the kind of life he deserved. He wouldn’t look back. He wouldn’t say good-bye. This was how it had to end. His strides grew longer, more sure of themselves. He reached for the door.
He registered the sound of the gunshot and the stinging in his leg simultaneously. But before the pain truly hit him, his first and last coherent thought was not of himself, or of Bear, or Violet, or Caitlin, or Maribel.
He did it, he thought, as he crumpled to the floor, his hands instinctively going to the wound that was already oozing blood. The son of a gun really did it.
A chorus of frightened wails came from down the hall. Finn thought he could make out Bear’s cry alongside the twins’. So the boys were all there, after all.
“They are mine, regardless,” George said. “And they come first.” He headed down the hallway, leaving Finn to fend for himself.
36
AUGUST 2016
Caitlin opened the front door and stopped where she stood. Finn grimaced up at her from the floor, shivering under one of her in-laws’ thick Native-American-patterned blankets. He looked as if he’d been there awhile, long enough to attempt to make himself comfortable, though why he would have chosen this spot at her feet was not immediately clear. Behind him, George was standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking as if he’d been caught eating someone else’s leftovers.
“What’s wrong?” Caitlin asked George, and when he didn’t answer, she turned her gaze back to Finn. “Why are you on the floor?”
Violet didn’t wait to find out. She pushed past Caitlin without so much as a glance at Finn and ran down the hallway toward the bedrooms, toward Bear. Finn watched her go, looking sad and deflated. And then Caitlin noticed something on the blanket. A dark stain. She knelt down, lifted the edge, and gasped. Finn’s pant leg was soaked in blood. A tourniquet had been tied around the top of his thigh with an old leather belt. The dark center of his wound almost looked like—
“Oh my God!”
“So much for no one needs to know anyone did anything wrong,” Finn quipped, trying to manage a smile through his pain. It came out as a clownlike wince.
Caitlin stepped toward George, confused. “You shot him?”
“I deserved it,” Finn said weakly. “Just not for the reason he thought.”
“And what was the reason you thought?” she yelled at George, but he turned away from her, his hands over his face. Her thoughts raced, frantic, disbelieving. Hours ago she had signed her son out of the hospital after accidentally poisoning him. Now they’d be rushing back again because George had shot a man? This couldn’t be happening. There wouldn’t be a way out of it this time. And Finn, her oldest friend …
Caitlin dropped to her knees. “Are you okay? Has an ambulance been called?”
“Not yet,” Finn said. “I think we were waiting for you.”
“George!” He didn’t turn around. She saw the glint of something in his hand. “George, for God’s sake, put down that gun!”
Finn couldn’t see into the kitchen from his vantage point on the floor, and his eyes went wide at Caitlin’s words. “Tell him,” he said, his voice hoarse.
“Tell him what?”
“Tell him the boys aren’t mine. That I’m not their father.”
Oh God. Violet said he’d known the twins weren’t his from the start. But had he thought it was Finn all along? Had he thought it was Finn and gone along with that for years too?
Caitlin stood and slowly moved toward her husband, the way she might approach a wounded animal. When she was finally close enough to reach out and lay a hand on his shoulder, he flinched.
“The boys are not Finn’s, George.”
He wheeled around to face her, and his eyes were so unfamiliar, she took a step back. “Well they sure as hell aren’t mine,” he said, and his voice broke. Tears filled his eyes.
“To me they are,” she said. “To me, they are yours. And to Gus and Leo, you are their father, and they love you. And I promise, they aren’t Finn’s.”
“He’s lucky I thought they were,” George growled. “It might be the reason I shot him, but it’s also the reason I didn’t turn him in the moment I found out he was here.” He pulled at his hair with his fists, the way Leo and Gus did when they were trying to calm down from a tantrum. Caitlin had never noticed the gesture in George before.
“The idea of me not being their biological father, I’ve tried to accept that. But the idea of their real father being in prison, because I helped put him there? That I didn’t think I could live with.”
“But you could live with shooting him?”
“In the leg! It’s not like I was aiming for his head! I was just stopping him from running away from this.”
“But he—”
“For years, I’ve waited for you to tell me, and nothing. You think I’m just going to accept the first explanation you give me?”
“And you’ve been nothing but honest? Omitting the tiny detail that you were infertile?”
He froze.
“We’ll get Finn a paternity test,” she said, her voice shaking. “Then you’ll see. You didn’t have to shoot him! What the hell are we supposed to do now?”
George pounded his fist onto the counter, and Caitlin jumped. Behind her, a whimper came from Finn. “Right, so this is all my fault!” George exploded. “At least I didn’t try to shoot him and hit Leo instead!”
Caitlin burst into tears. She turned and saw Finn dragging himself out from behind the leather couch and into the open, where he could see what was going on.
“Look at us!” she screamed at him. “After all that we’ve done for you, after we tried to be there for you, no matter what you’d done—look what you’ve done to us!”
37
AUGUST 2016
Violet fell to her knees on the bunkroom floor and scooped up Bear into her arms, sleeping bag and all, hugging him to her as tight as she could. Tears of relief and elation and anger and sadness poured down her face and into his baby-soft curls. He mumbled something into her chest, and she pulled back enough to let him tilt his face up to hers and open his sleepy eyes.
“Mommy,” he said, smiling, and closed them again as his little arms wrapped around her—just as they always had, right where they belonged.
“Oh, baby, I missed you so much, so much, so much…”
“Mommy, why are you crying?”
She buried her face in his hair. She had to keep it together, for Bear. He probably didn’t understand what had gone on, or where she’d been. Who knew what Finn might have told him? And she didn’t want to wake the twins if she could help it.
“I just … I couldn’t find you, Bear Cub,” she whispered. “A lot of people have been helping Mommy look everywhere for you!”
“I was with Daddy.”
“I know you were, sweetheart.”
“I was missing you.”
She blinked away fresh tears. “Me too, little man. Me too. But it’s okay now. I’m here.” She rocked him back and forth, and he clutched her tighter. “I’m not going anywhere,” she promised him. “You’re staying with me.”
Violet could hear faint sounds of shouting coming from the living room. For too many days, she’d been determined to have the chance to be face-to-face with her husband, to confront him head-on. And yet now that she was here, all she wanted to do was curl up in this sleeping bag with Bear and let the rest of the world just fall away.
Even as Bear clung to Violet, his eyes were rolling back into his head. There was no telling how exhausted he’d been and for how long. Now that he was safe in her arms, he drifted back to sleep as if it were the most natural thing in the world—and it was. Even with the twins starting to stir in their bunks. Even with the yelling down the hall. Even though Violet knew that soon the cops would be on the way, and the feds, and they’d take Finn away, and Bear’s world would be changed forever.
Violet had to talk to Finn first, whether she wanted to or not. That was why Caitlin had brought her here instead of carrying Bear to her. And though she wanted to hate Caitlin for it, she also knew in some back corner of her mind that Caitlin was probably right. This could be her only chance to talk to Finn in private, to try to get real answers to her questions. She’d been willing to let him walk away if that was the only way she could get Bear back. But now that she was here, now that Finn didn’t have a choice in the matter, she wasn’t going to dissolve their life together without at least an explanation. He owed her that much.
She pulled at a blanket that had been tucked into Bear’s sleeping bag and wrapped it around him, discarding the bag on the floor. She stood, and his head rolled easily onto her shoulder, his legs wrapped around her middle, his arms loose around her neck. He shouldn’t hear what was about to be said, but he was going to have to come with her anyway. She wasn’t about to let him out of her sight. She just hoped he’d sleep through the worst of it.
She forced her legs to move, one foot in front of the other, down the hall, to the place where the living room met the kitchen. There, she stopped and stared in horror. Finn was cowering on a blood-smeared floor. His pants were soaked through. Seeing Bear in Violet’s arms, he rushed to cover his legs with the blanket that had been draped over him when they’d walked in. Caitlin was standing, sobbing, midway between him and George. She swiped angrily at her tears with the backs of her hands.
“Oh my God,” Violet said, her eyes widening as she caught sight of George setting a gun on the kitchen counter. He backed away from it as if it might attack him on its own. “What happened?”
Finn looked at Violet as if she were some foregone conclusion he’d been avoiding. “There was a … misunderstanding,” Caitlin said. She turned away, still sniffling, took George by the elbow and pulled him toward the sliding glass doors. “We’re going to go outside and let you talk. But you don’t have long. We need to call an ambulance.”
Violet stared in disbelief as the door shut behind them. An unnatural silence filled the room. She crossed to the couch and gingerly laid down Bear, who tucked his hands under his chin and curled up into a ball without waking. Reluctantly, she turned back to Finn.
“I know we have to talk, but he stays with me,” she said quietly. “I promised him.”
Finn nodded, and she stood looking down at him, trying to bite back her rising concern. How long had he been like this?
“I guess you know everything,” he said with a grimace, and she couldn’t tell if he was bracing himself against the pain of his wound or against whatever she was about to say.
“What’s everything?” she asked, careful to keep her voice calm. “How would I even know the answer to that?”
I don’t know anything! she wanted to scream. We promised to love each other forever, and I don’t even know if you ever loved me at all!
When he didn’t reply, she sighed and lowered herself slowly onto the floor next to him. “I think I got the basics.”
He nodded, but still did not speak.
�
�For one thing, I’m thinking moving to Asheville was a bad idea,” she said.
“It didn’t help matters,” he admitted.
Would you have been able to love me somewhere else? Could we have been a family?
“You should have told me. All of it. Any of it.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Outside on the porch, she could see Caitlin try to put her arms around George. He shrugged her off and walked into the darkness, and Caitlin followed.
“Did you ever even try to tell me? Did I … I don’t know, miss something?”
“No.”
This sullen teenager routine was only making Violet resent Finn more. But she also knew that eventually, the intensity of that resentment would fade—didn’t it always, no matter who did the betraying or how bad things seemed? And then what would she be left with, besides unanswered questions?
She tried again. “I guess I don’t get why you didn’t feel like you could. If not at first, then before you checked out. I admit I might not have reacted well, but anything would have been better than this. How can I ever trust you again?”
Finn was trembling. Shock must be setting in. “You don’t have to. We won’t be married anymore. And I’ll be … wherever they send me.” He said “they” as if he were talking about some all-encompassing hypothetical and not a very real federal agent who had been sitting at Violet’s kitchen table not forty-eight hours ago, telling her that her husband might as well have been a stranger. And yet, the most unexpected thing now, seeing him like this, was that he was not a stranger at all. He was still Finn. And for the moment, at least, she was still his wife.
“Last time I checked, you’re my son’s father. Tell me again why I don’t have to trust you?”
Finn looked properly chastened, but he didn’t backpedal. “For starters, I think Uncle Sam is going to have a big hand in my parenting moving forward.”
“I get the feeling Caitlin wants me to tell them this has all been a big misunderstanding.”
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