Chapter eleven

Two weeks passed and then another, and nothing came back from the registries, nothing that Patricia could call promising, nothing that Dr. Hana could present to me with anything resembling optimism.

Jake got quieter.

Not dramatically, or in a way that would alarm a stranger, but I knew him better than I knew most things in the world, and I could see it, the slight dimming, the way he napped longer in the afternoons, the way he sometimes just sat and looked out the window in a way that four year olds aren't supposed to do.

Julie watched him too. She had always been the louder twin, the one who filled rooms, but lately she had taken to sitting close to him, pressing her small shoulder against his, not saying anything, just there. She was four years old and she didn't have language for what she was sensing, but she was sensing it.

I watched them both from across the room one evening and felt something harden in me.

Not anger, not grief, something more functional than either of those. Something that felt like a door closing and a different one opening. The particular resolve of a person who has run out of the luxury of waiting.

I told Ryan that night.

I called him at ten, after the twins were asleep, and I said it plainly, the way I had learned to say difficult things in the years since I had stopped softening everything for the comfort of the people around me.

"I'm going to find Darius," I said. "And I'm going to make him test."

Ryan was quiet for a moment. "Make him," he said. "How?"

"I don't know yet. But he's their father and Jake needs him and I am not going to watch my son get sicker because I was too proud or too afraid to walk into a room with a man I used to know."

"You're not afraid," Ryan said.

"No," I agreed. "I'm not."

And the thing was, I meant it. Whatever fear I'd had of Darius, of what it would mean to surface after five years of careful invisibility, of what he might do with the knowledge that the twins existed, all of it had been sitting quietly in the back of my mind for weeks, and now I looked directly at it and found it smaller than Jake's face at the window.

"He might not agree," Ryan said. "Even if you find him."

"Then I'll find a way to persuade him."

"And if he can't be persuaded?"

I thought about the woman I had been five years ago, standing in a parking lot signing divorce papers by streetlight, shaking and silent and with nowhere to go.

I thought about the woman I was now.

"He will be," I said.

Ryan didn't argue, which meant he believed me, or at least believed that I believed it, which was enough for now.

I called Patricia in the morning and told her to keep the registry search running, that I was pursuing a parallel option, that I needed Darius Blackwood's current location.

"His location," she repeated carefully.

"He's the biological father. He's the next logical step and I should have taken it weeks ago."

A pause. "I can have someone look into it discreetly. It may take a few days."

"That's fine."

"Brynn," Patricia said. "Are you sure about this?"

I looked across the apartment to the hallway where the twins' door was closed, where Jake was sleeping, where Julie was pressed against her brother's side the way she had been every night this week.

"Yes," I said. "I'm sure."

I spent the rest of the morning on a call with my lawyer, a woman named Clare who had handled every legal matter of my rebuilt life and who did not ask unnecessary questions. I told her I needed to understand my options, and she listened and asked the right questions and told me what I needed to know.

Then I sat at the kitchen table and I thought about Darius Blackwood, for the first time in five years, deliberately and without flinching.

I thought about who he had been and who I had been and everything that had happened between us, and then I set all of it aside the way you set aside something that no longer serves the situation, and I thought instead about what I knew of who he was now, what he had become in five years, what he valued, what he feared, what kind of approach would work and what kind would fail.

I was good at reading people. I had always been good at it, and five years in an industry built entirely on human behavior had made me better.

Darius Blackwood was about to find that out.