Chapter 100: What Thomas Owed

Chapter 100: What Thomas Owed
Amelia's POV

I sat up in the dark with the ring still in my hand and Grayson sat up beside me because he wasn't going to pretend he wasn't listening and I appreciated that, I'd stopped wanting him to pretend things a long time ago.

"Dad," I said into the phone, and the word still felt strange in my mouth when I said it to him, like wearing shoes that almost fit. "It's late. Are you okay."

"I'm fine," he said, and his voice was steadier than it had been in the sitting room earlier, like the hospital had given him something or sleep had, or maybe just the fact of being out of that house. "I know it's late. I'm sorry. But I've been lying here for two hours trying to decide whether to say this tomorrow or now and I keep landing on now because I've been saying tomorrow for twenty years and look where that got us."

I looked at Grayson and he gave me a small nod that said I'll be here, take your time, and I got up and went to sit on the small chair by the window because this felt like a standing-up conversation, or at least a sitting-up-straight one.

"Okay," I said. "I'm listening."

Thomas was quiet for a moment like he was organising the words, and then he said, "Your mother never stopped loving me. I need you to know that first because everything else only makes sense if you understand that part."

I didn't say anything because there wasn't anything to say to that yet.

"We were young when we met," he said, "and everything was good for a long time, genuinely good, and then William Hayes got involved in my work and things got complicated in ways I didn't handle well." He stopped. "That's the polite version. The honest version is that I made choices that put her in danger and when it got bad enough that I couldn't protect her anymore I chose the coward's way out and faked my death and told myself I was doing it for her."

"Were you," I said, and my voice came out more even than I felt.

"Partly," he said. "But partly I was just scared. And those two things got so tangled together that I couldn't tell them apart for years and by the time I could, too much time had passed and you were both grown and she'd built a life and I didn't know how to step back into it without breaking everything she'd built."

I looked out the window at the dark street and thought about my mother raising us alone, working double shifts, never complaining, and I felt the complicated thing I always felt about Thomas Raine, not quite forgiveness but not quite the opposite of it either.

"She knew you were alive," I said, because I'd suspected this for a while.

"She found out about eight years ago," he said quietly. "A mutual contact told her. She never reached out. I think she'd made her peace with it by then." He paused. "But she wrote me a letter. She never sent it. I found it among her things after she died, through the lawyer who was handling the estate. She must have given it to him years ago to pass on."

"What did it say," I said.

"That she forgave me," he said, and his voice cracked slightly on the last word, just slightly. "That she wanted me to know that. And that she hoped I'd found something worth staying alive for."

The room was very quiet.

I sat with that for a long time and Thomas didn't fill the silence and I was grateful because I needed to sit inside it, needed to feel the shape of it, my mother who'd been hurt and abandoned and had raised two daughters and kept twenty years of secrets and still somehow found the grace to write that letter and mean it.

"There's something else," Thomas said.

"I know," I said, because of course there was, there was always something else with Thomas Raine. "Tell me."

"You have a half-brother," he said. "His name is Daniel. He's twenty-two. His mother was someone I was with briefly years after I disappeared, when I was living under a different name in Philadelphia. She passed away two years ago and he's been on his own since." He paused. "He doesn't know about any of this. He doesn't know who I am, not really. But he exists and he's yours if you want him and I thought you deserved to know that."

I stared at the window and processed this and my brain was doing the thing where it just kept looping on the new information without being able to get past it.

A brother.

Twenty-two years old.

Living somewhere in this city or close to it, completely unaware.

"Does he know about us," I said.

"No," Thomas said. "But I have his number. And his address. Whatever you decide to do with that is entirely yours, both yours and Elena's. I'm not asking you to do anything. I just couldn't keep it from you anymore."

I said I'd call him tomorrow and he said okay and we said goodbye and I hung up and sat very still in the chair for a moment.

Grayson was watching me from the bed.

"Well," I said.

"Well," he agreed.

"Apparently I have a brother," I said.

"I heard," he said.

I looked at the ring still in my hand, which I'd been holding this whole conversation, and something about the combination of those two things, the ring and the news of Daniel, hit me in a way I hadn't expected, like life just kept expanding when you thought it was done.

"I need to tell Elena," I said.

"In the morning," Grayson said firmly.

"She'll be upset I didn't wake her," I said.

"She'll survive," he said. "Come back to bed."

I got up and went back to the bed and sat beside him and held out the ring and he took it and looked at me and I held out my left hand and he slid it on and we both looked at it for a moment without speaking.

"Twenty-two," I said. "He's twenty-two years old."

"And you'll figure out what to do about that," Grayson said. "Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," I agreed.

I lay down and he pulled the blanket over us and the ring was new and strange and real on my finger and outside the city kept going and somewhere in a hospital bed my father was probably staring at the ceiling and somewhere there was a young man named Daniel who had our mother's eyes and didn't know it yet.

In the morning Elena came downstairs and I put a cup of tea in front of her and sat across from her and said "I have two things to tell you and the first one is good news."

She looked at the ring immediately.

"Oh my god," she said.

"Yes," I said.

She screamed, actually screamed, loud enough that Grayson came in from the hallway looking alarmed and then understood and looked profoundly relieved it wasn't a crisis, and Elena launched herself at me across the table and hugged me hard and then pulled back and said "what's the second thing" and I took a breath.

"Dad called last night," I said. "Elena, we have a brother."

She stared at me.

"His name is Daniel," I said. "He's twenty-two." I paused. "And apparently he has Mom's eyes."