“The real question, Alex,” she said, “is what you’re going to do when you find out the answer.” It was, he would come to understand, the truest thing anyone said to him in that whole long reckoning.

Because the answer to are they mine was, in a sense, the easy part; the arithmetic and the dimple and the hazel eyes had already told him.

The hard part, the part Elena was pointing at, was everything that came after knowing: whether he would be a checkbook or a father, whether he would try to buy his way in or earn his way in, whether he had learned anything at all in six years.

He did not have an answer for her yet.