I went down onto my knees on the rug, so that I was level with my sons, level with the four small faces I had grieved for six years without knowing they were alive.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
To them.
To her.
To all of it.
“I’m so sorry it took me six years to find you.
I didn’t know.
I swear to you on my life, I didn’t know.”
Tobias studied me with his serious gray-blue eyes.
He looked down at the little car in his hand, and then back at me, and asked the question that split my heart clean open.
“Mister,” he said.
“Are you really our dad?”
It is a strange thing, to be asked that by a child who has every reason to ask it and no reason yet to want the answer to be yes.
I had been a rumor to these boys, if I had been anything at all — the absent father, the man who wasn’t there, whatever their mother had managed to tell them that was both true and survivable.