Then again.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
Dad stared at Vanessa.
Vanessa looked as though she might faint.
“No.”
“What is this?”
“I don’t know.”
Dad’s voice shook.
“I was seventeen.”
Vanessa backed away.
“No. Mason, you never…”
“I barely knew you.”
“I know!”
The bank manager quietly left the room.
I stared at the document.
According to everything I had just learned, Caleb was supposed to be my biological father.
But the report said he wasn’t.
It said Mason was.
The man who had found me outside his door.
The teenager who had sacrificed football, college, sleep, money, and almost every normal part of being young to raise me.
My dad.
My actual father.
“How?” I whispered.
Vanessa was crying.
“I don’t understand.”
Then Dad picked up the VHS tape.
A label was attached.
MASON — WATCH BEFORE YOU BELIEVE VANESSA.
Vanessa stopped breathing.
Dad looked at her.
“What did Caleb know?”
“I don’t know.”
“Vanessa.”
“I swear.”
We found an old video conversion shop that afternoon.
The owner transferred the tape onto a digital file.
We watched it inside his back office.
The screen flickered.
Caleb appeared.
Young.
Nervous.
Alive.
He looked directly into the camera.
“Mason, if you’re watching this, Dad probably told you I’m dead.”
Dad leaned forward.
Caleb continued.
“He’ll tell Vanessa I’m dead too.”
Vanessa whispered, “Oh my God.”
“But I’m not.”
My heart stopped.
The video had been recorded eighteen years earlier.
Caleb looked behind him before continuing.
“I’m leaving Ridgemont tonight. I have enough evidence to bring Walter down, but there’s something I need you to understand before I go.”
He lifted a document.
The same paternity report.
“Mason, Eleanor is your biological daughter.”
Dad stood up.
“No.”
Caleb continued.
“You won’t remember Vanessa.”
Dad stared at the screen.
“What?”
“But she remembers you.”
Vanessa suddenly turned pale.
Then she whispered two words.
“Oh, Mason.”
Dad looked at her.
“What?”
Tears rolled down her face.
“I didn’t know.”
“Know what?”
She stared at him.
“That night.”
“What night?”
She stepped backward.
“The lake party.”
Dad’s expression changed.
He had mentioned that party once.
The summer he was sixteen.
He had gotten drunk for the first and only time in his life.
He remembered almost nothing afterward.
Vanessa covered her face.
“I was there.”
My skin prickled.
Before she could explain, Caleb’s recorded voice continued.
“What happened between Mason and Vanessa was not what either of them were told afterward.”
Dad slowly turned back toward the screen.
Then Caleb said the words that silenced everyone.
“Dad arranged it.”
