Snowfall on Haven Point(99)
Marshall looked at Herm and Louise, who didn’t seem to know what to say.
“You’re sending me away, aren’t you?” He couldn’t miss the fear in the boy’s voice.
“I... No, honey,” his grandmother assured him. “We promised we wouldn’t.”
He faced Marshall, belligerence clear in every line of his body. “I didn’t steal that cell phone! You can’t arrest me. I have witnesses who saw the whole thing go down. They didn’t want to tell the principal, but they’ll tell the cops. I know they will.”
“You’re not going to jail. I’m not here to arrest you.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
Christopher moved into the room and his gaze landed on the picture in his grandmother’s hands.
“Who is that?”
Herm and Louise seemed frozen in uncertainty, both looking at Marshall to give them guidance. They had to tell him. He couldn’t see any other way around it.
His heart pounding, Marshall pulled the photograph from Louise and handed it to Christopher.
“That’s my younger brother, Wyatt. He was a highway patrol officer and was struck and killed by a car five years ago while helping a motorist during a bad storm.”
“He looks like me. Why?” Christopher gazed down at the picture and then his eyes—an exact match to Marshall’s own—lifted. “Are we related or something?”
Marshall looked one last time at Herm and Louise. After a pause, Herm gave a slight nod, tacit permission, and Marshall turned back to the troubled boy he already cared so deeply about and wanted desperately to help.
“There is a pretty good chance he’s your uncle. Which would make me your father.”
* * *
AN HOUR LATER, feeling utterly exhausted yet also buoyed by more optimism than he’d known in a long time, Marshall made his slow way across the snow to his house.
He had a son.
Yes, they still needed to do the DNA test, but he had no doubt what the results would be.
Christopher had taken the news with surprising nonchalance, though Marshall knew that could be a temporary state of shock. Really, though, the boy hadn’t even seemed all that shocked.
“I knew Johann wasn’t my dad. I’ve known it for a long time,” he said, which had made his grandmother burst into more tears.
“How?” she had asked. “Did your mother tell you that?”
He shook his head. “I heard them fighting about it four or five years ago, I think, after my mom’s second divorce. She was trying to get more child support, and he refused, and I heard him say he was already paying out the nose for someone else’s bastard. They didn’t know I heard. I didn’t know what bastard meant and had to look it up.”
What must that have been like, to be a young boy hearing your father disavow you. No wonder Christopher adopted a smart-ass attitude to the world.
Marshall’s chest felt jagged and raw as he contemplated the pain his son had endured because of Marshall’s own foolish choices.
“I am so sorry,” he had said, knowing the words were wholly inadequate.
His son had shrugged with that indifference Marshall now realized was so carefully cultivated. “In some ways, it made it all easier, you know? Before that, I just thought he didn’t love me because of something I did.”
Though he had grieved deeply each time, he had tried hard not to weep when Wyatt died or he lost a buddy in Iraq or when his beloved father had been shot.
In that moment, as he listened to Christopher’s casual acceptance of another man’s cruelty to an innocent child, he felt his eyes burn and his throat close.
He had wanted to hug him even as he sensed they weren’t quite there yet. It would come, but Marshall knew it would take time before Christopher would accept that kind of easy affection from him.
He was grateful when Louise did it for him, wrapping Christopher in her arms and holding tightly while Herm managed to put an arm around both of them.
“I have a lot of regrets in my life,” Marshall had admitted. “The biggest, though, is not fighting for you when I found out thirteen years ago there was a chance I might have a son. I should have. I can make a hundred excuses for why I didn’t—why at the time I thought I was doing the best thing for you—but they don’t really matter. In the end, I’m only left with remorse.”
After a few more moments of talking, Christopher finally asked the question on Marshall’s mind and, he guessed, the boy’s grandparents.
“So what now?”
“We’ll do a DNA test if you want, to be sure. It might make your grandparents a little more comfortable with the whole thing, but I know everything I need to. You’re my son and, more than anything, I’d like the chance to be your father, if you’ll let me.”