And Emmerson Marsden had held me the day I was born and decided, knowing everything, that I was his — and had kept a photograph through twenty-six years of darkness because it had my baby face in it — and had come up out of that cellar and said you got so big. Blood is a fact.

Fatherhood is a choice.

One of these men was my father, and it was not the one whose blood I carried.

I understood, working this out, why my father had said he got it wrong for a while.

Because when you learn a thing like this — that the man you called Dad is not your blood, that your blood belongs instead to a monster — the first reflex is to feel that the ground has been stolen from under you, that your very self was built on a false foundation, that you are somehow less real than you were an hour ago.

Emmerson had felt that once, he admitted, in the early days after I was born: a bitterness, a sense of raising another man’s child, a temptation to love me a little less because of an accident of biology I had no part in choosing.