The sentence made no sense.
“Thomas had another son?”
“No.”
“Then?”
She whispered, “Daniel does.”
I stared at her.
“What?”
“Daniel has a son.”
“No. He doesn’t.”
“That’s what everyone thought.”
Vanessa reached into her bag and removed a photograph.
A young man stood outside a university building.
Dark hair.
Gray-brown eyes.
A familiar expression.
I knew that face.
Not literally.
But enough of Daniel lived inside it that recognition arrived before logic.
“His name is Lucas Hale.”
I could barely speak.
“How old?”
“Twenty.”
Daniel was forty-one.
Twenty years earlier, he had been twenty-one.
“Who is his mother?”
“Rachel Morgan.”
I knew that name.
Daniel’s college girlfriend.
He had mentioned her exactly once during our marriage.
“They had a child?”
“Yes.”
“Did Daniel know?”
“No.”
“How does Lucas have the Hale surname?”
“Rachel married into the Hale family when Lucas was two. He was raised under that surname.”
