I turned around. Her face had gone completely white.
“What did you say?”
“Vale,” I repeated.
She stared at me like she was looking at a ghost.
“Christopher. What was your father’s name? Your real father?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“My mother wouldn’t talk about him. Ever.”
Claire sat down hard in one of the conference chairs.
“Marcus’s father had another son,” she said slowly. “Marcus told me once, when he’d been drinking. His father’s oldest boy. From before he married Marcus’s mother. Thomas. The family cut him off. Nobody was ever allowed to say his name at Thanksgiving.”
I couldn’t feel my hands.
“Thomas had a baby,” Claire went on, “with a girl the family didn’t approve of. A waitress. Her name was Laura.”
My knees almost buckled.
My mother’s name was Laura. She waited tables at a steakhouse in White Plains for eleven years.
“When were you born?” Claire whispered.
I told her.
She covered her mouth with both hands. “That’s the same year.”
“No,” I said. “This is crazy. This is insane.”
But then I remembered things. Things I hadn’t thought about in decades.
My mother crying in the kitchen when I asked about my father in third grade.
Birthday cards that came every year until I was eight, with no return address and a twenty-dollar bill inside. Signed just “T.”
A photograph I found once in her jewelry box, of her standing by a lake next to a dark-haired young man with my eyebrows. She tore it in half when she caught me holding it. I was ten.
“Daniel,” Eleanor said. “Find out. Tonight.”
It took him four hours.
My biological father was Thomas Vale. The older half-brother of Marcus Vale.
Thomas died in a car accident on the Taconic Parkway when I was eight years old.
That’s when the birthday cards stopped.
I never knew. Not one word.
And at first we all assumed Marcus never knew I existed either.
Until the investigators went through the papers Claire had taken out of his safe.
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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