He kept reading, and his mouth dropped.
She is survived by her husband Mark and her two children.
She has kids. I have half-siblings.
Nathan wiped his tears off his cheeks. He had family in New Zealand. Even though they were half a world away, he felt close to them. They were alive. But did they know he existed?
* * *
Eamonn Charles hadat one time been Nathan’s boyfriend but now transitioned into the role of his Jiminy Cricket, the friend who was his voice of reason and conscience, whether he liked it or not. Eamonn had been a good boyfriend to him. Kind, devoted, loving. Nathan had treated him like an accessory and cheated on him right in front of his eyes. Yet somehow, they had managed to repair the damage and emerge as friends. Eamonn was like a nutrient that Nathan needed in his life.
“No. That is a terrible idea,” Eamonn said over the phone. “You cannot go to New Zealand.”
“Why not?” Nathan poured himself a glass of wine and traipsed through the living room, flinging his fingers against the plush drapes of the floor-to-ceiling windows. “I have family there.”
“Supposedly. Just because one person on the internet says it’s true doesn’t mean it is.”
“I checked. It was her, E.”
“So maybe write them an email.”
“An email? This is the most momentous news of my bloody life, and you want me to deliver it via email?”
“So what’s your plan? Just show up at their doorstep?”
“Exactly.” Nathan had a flair for the dramatic. There was some juicy symmetry in that scenario, what with his mum leaving him on his dad’s doorstep. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“If you want adventure, go parasailing.”
Nathan knew how this might’ve sounded, but he’d been wondering about his mum for the past six years. Hell, for his entire life. His dad had told him that his mum had no family, that she was an orphan, hence why they never did family events with that side of the family. His dad knew how to spin a story, though the apple did not fall from the tree on that one.
“And what about those two kids? It’s probably going to be a shock to them. They might not even know you exist!” Eamonn’s raspy voice was layered with concern. He’d always worried about Nathan and was the one who got him to go to rehab, even after Nathan had punched his new boyfriend in the face.Oops.
“I tracked down an address for her husband Mark Foster. He lives on a farm.” Nathan had only been to a farm once, on a primary school field trip. He’d gotten in trouble for pretending to jerk off a cow’s udder and had to sit on the school bus for the rest of the day.
“You don’t even know their names or genders. You have to be careful with this. You can’t be impulsive. Remember how you felt when your dad dropped this bombshell on you? I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
Nathan slid down the drapes to the floor. His stepmum loved talking about how much she paid for these gold drapes. Nathan blew rings of smoke onto them.
“My mum was killed in a car accident a year ago. Just one year ago. What if I had found this photograph earlier? What if I had found her…” Nathan’s voice wobbled with emotion that usually remained smothered in a haze of booze and sarcasm. Tears stung at his eyes. “I could’ve met her if I hadn’t made myself forget, if I hadn’t been fucking my life up. I don’t want to waste anymore time. I have family out there, E.”
“You have family in London.”
“It’s not the same. You know how they are with me.” Eamonn knew. He had almost punched one of his cousins one Christmas for calling them faggots. “Not one of them contacted me when they heard I went to rehab. And my dad just wishes I wasn’t here at all. I have real family out there, people who I could connect with, who could make me feel part of something, like the way you feel with your sisters and mum.”
Nathan gulped back a lump in his throat. “And I want to know.”
“Know what?” Eamonn asked.
“Why them and not me?” Nathan held back his tears. He’d already been mushier in the past twelve hours than he had in the past twelve years.
Eamonn didn’t respond.
“E, still there?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you thinking?”
