“I know what I told you.”

“Then they’re someone else’s children.”

I wanted certainty as badly as she did.

But for the first time in years I was no longer willing to substitute certainty for evidence.

PART 5

That night I opened the locked drawer where I kept the paperwork from my first marriage.

It contained the divorce decree, the returned transfer notice, and the short handwritten note about family not being a transaction.

I read the note three times.