Her eyebrows shot up. “Oh?”
“Yeah.” Carver hesitated, nursing a hunch. “Do you — you wouldn’t happen to maybe, uh, know something about me?”
Josie looked confused at first, but this look melted into cold hard recognition, which she was too slow in covering up with blankness. “Like what?” she said, before gnawing her lower lip.
She had basically given herself away there. He felt comfortable proceeding.
“Whose son I am,” he said.
Josie brought her hands to her face the same way Nora had earlier. “Oh,” she said into them, her eyes huge and round.
“Okay.” Carver exhaled, only then realizing how much his heartbeat had just sped up. “Okay. Dideveryoneknow about me? Everyone but me?”
“Oh, no, honey,” she said, and came closer, taking him by the shoulders. “No, no. It’s only because she’s my sister. I never tolda soul. Not Letty, not Priscilla, not Hank. God, I can’t believe this. I told her to tell you so many times, over and over. I thought about telling you myself, but I knew she’d never speak to me again.” Her face crumpled. “Oh, Carver.”
Carver wept then, with the same mixture of grief and relief that had been coming to him in waves for the last few hours. Josie hugged him, bringing his head to her shoulder, and he wrapped his arms around her.
“Sorry,” he choked out after a moment, pulling back.
“Don’t apologize.” She dug in her bathrobe pocket and handed him a travel pack of Kleenex, which he made use of. “You’re in luck, I’m just getting over a sinus infection. No, don’t apologize, okay? I’d be a mess if I were you.”
“I’ve been a mess.”
“Oh, sweetheart. God, I don’t even know what to say.” She wiped her own eyes. “I want you to know, it was very hard on them — not your existence, but the secret. Nora would come over and sob to me for hours because she could see how alienated you felt, but at a certain point she thought you were too old for them to tell you — that you’d feel even more alienated and lose all trust in them. But the situation only got worse, but never quite bad enough.” She hesitated. “This is going to sound terrible, but I think they felt that as long as you were physically safe, it was better not to. They thought you just hated them. You were tough enough that I don’t think they realized the extent of what you were going through.”
Carver tried to read between the lines of this. “You’re saying if I’d started hurting myself, or doing heroin, they would have told me?”
“Something like that, yes. That’s my theory, anyway, based on what Nora said.”
Carver cleared his throat and wiped his eyes again. “What did you tell her, when you guys talked?”
“I told her to just do it, to tear off the Band-Aid. I told her the truth would set you all free and you’d figure out what to do as a family. You — God. I can’t even tell you how many times I told her that. I can’t believe they finally told you.”
“Yeah, and they didn’t, even. Chip did.”
Josie reeled, open-mouthed. “Chipknows?”
“He figured it out, he said. When Aaron was born, based on what he found out about blood types.”
“That is wild. Wow. You know, I always thought Chip would make a better cop than a lawyer.”
Carver laughed. “Listen, I kind of have a lot going on this weekend — I know you do too —”
“Oh, right, you came here for Scott,” Josie said, grabbing his forearm. “I completely forgot, sorry about that.”
“No, it’s fine, I just wanted to say, like… when things settle down some, I’d like —” He cleared his throat again. “Maybe I could come out and see you guys, take you out to dinner, and you and I could, like, talk?”
“Yes, absolutely,” Josie said. “Name the day. Do you want to shit-talk your mom? Because you get a free pass from me for that.”
“Not shit-talk, just… uh… talk.”
“Absolutely.”
“I actually had a pretty good talk with each of them,” Carver said, “but they’re kind of, uh…”
“Emotionally incompetent?”
“Yeah… something like that.”
