“Another man’s baby,” I finished quietly, from where I stood with Iris in my arms.
The whole room looked at me.
“That’s what you said, Carson. At the foot of my hospital bed. Thirty minutes after I gave you a daughter.” I held his eyes, and I was not cruel, because I didn’t need to be — the truth was doing all the work. “I’m not raising another man’s baby. Do you remember?” I shifted Iris gently against my shoulder. “It turns out the only person in this family raising another man’s baby… was your mother. For thirty-eight years. And she did it with more love than you showed your own daughter in the first thirty minutes of her life.”
Carson sank into a chair like his legs had stopped working.
I watched him come apart, and I felt something I hadn’t expected — not satisfaction, but a strange, sad recognition. Because I understood, in that moment, that Carson was as much a victim of this family’s sickness as I was. He had been handed the bl*odline poison as a boy and taught to drink it as pride. He’d been told his whole life that his worth lived in his bl*od, and now, in front of everyone, he’d learned the bl*od was borrowed. Everything he thought made him special had just evaporated.
