He raised his eyes to mine, and there was something almost pleading in them, a hope he was afraid to hold.

“If Christopher ran a genetic test comparing my sample to this child’s,” he said slowly, “expecting to prove that you and I are strangers, that there is no connection between us at all…” He did not finish the sentence.

He did not have to.

My own mind had already begun, with a rising and dizzying certainty, to finish it for him.

Chapter 17 — A Son and a Grandson