My eyes raced downward.
Mother:
Ruth Elaine Bennett.
Lucas gripped the edge of the table.
Elena whispered, “Oh my God.”
My aunt.
The woman who had supposedly died as an infant.
Was Lucas’s mother.
But there was one more line.
One I hadn’t yet read.
Father.
My eyes moved toward it.
And everything inside me stopped.
Because the name written there was not blank.
It wasn’t unknown.
It wasn’t anyone I had ever expected to see.
Douglas watched my face.
“Hannah?”
I couldn’t answer.
He tried again.
“What does it say?”
I looked at Lucas.
Then at Douglas.
Then back at the document.
The man listed as Lucas’s biological father was someone whose funeral I had attended twenty-three years earlier.
Someone whose photographs had filled my childhood home.
Someone whose name I had written every year on Father’s Day cards.
My hands began to shake.
