I know that.

I was a kid drowning in a shame that wasn’t even mine to carry.”

And then, because the folder was open and the worst of it was already said, the rest came out of Fabian in a low steady voice, like water finding a channel it had been dammed against for fifteen years.

His mother had been young, he said, and Bertram had been married within a year of leaving her — married to Matthias’s mother, in a big church wedding that made the society pages, while Fabian’s mother was three months pregnant and being told, by Bertram’s family lawyer, exactly how much money it would take to make her move to another state and disappear.

She took it.

Fabian did not blame her for taking it; she was alone and frightened and had a child coming, and the check was the only door anyone was offering her.