A technician swabbed my cheek and the boy’s, sealed the samples in front of me, and I spent five of the longest days of my life waiting.

The report came on a rainy Friday.

The probability of paternity read ninety-nine point nine nine nine eight percent.

I read that number four times to be sure I was not dreaming it.

Then I walked out to my truck, and I sat down behind the wheel, and I cried harder than I had cried at my own family’s funeral seven years before — because at that funeral I had been weeping for the dead, and now I was weeping for the living, and the second kind of weeping breaks something open in a way the first never can.

He was my son.