That wasn’t the last time that we had sex; far from it. If Allison felt the need, she would initiate, and I usually responded positively. If I felt the need, she never turned me down, no matter how tired she was. I was never cruel with her, always making sure that her body was ready with my fingers before we began, and she usually came at least once. 

But I used a condom every time, and we rarely fucked facing each other anymore; doggy and prone and reverse cowgirl became our go-to positions. That way, she wouldn’t have to see the love that wasn’t there. Like I said, I was never cruel.

Outside of the bedroom, things changed as well, but not in a way that would betray the rot eating at the heart of our marriage. The kids didn’t have a clue–I don’t think–even when we were at our worst. Julie was off doing her own things, and Travis usually was as well. Megan was a little nerd like her daddy, so she’d be in her room playing games and doing puzzles most of the time. Dinnertime generally came and went without tension, and the weekends found us busy with all sorts of activities.

What changed most obviously was how I spent my time. One of the things that I realized early on was that there was no way I’d be able to have a social life after divorcing Alli if I didn’t go out and make some friends of my own. I had friends, but they were almost all our friends, which meant, for the most part, that they were Alli’s friends. She had always been the social one. So I decided to fix that.

The problem was that I had no idea how to do that. Anyone who’s tried to make new friends as an adult, especially a middle-aged adult, will tell you it’s hard. Even more so if you aren’t very good at being social.

But Tate, again, came to my rescue, and even let me kill two birds with one stone. He rode with a cycle club, not a motorcycle club, but a bicycling one. I had gotten a bit pudgy as age and a sedentary lifestyle took their toll, but that guy was about as fit as they come. So, one day, I showed up at home with a bicycle rack and a brand new, way too expensive bike attached to it. Alli let it go uncommented upon, but Travis was very excited. Before the weekend was out, I had another bicycle on the rack, and Tate’s group had another member.

More importantly, though, I made a lot of friends there. Isabella was the first. She was a stunningly fit woman, a dozen years younger than me, with a slim, athletic build, beautiful green eyes, and long auburn hair that she kept in a braid when she was cycling. 

Yes, she caught me checking her out. 

But then she just laughed it off. “Hey, I know how I look. As long as you’re not a perv about it, I don’t mind; your eyes have to go somewhere.” I felt like a perv, but she didn’t seem to think so. Neither did Janine, her wife, who was almost as attractive. Ah, well. I was still technically married anyway.

And, oddly, they ended up being some of the best friends I ever had. They both encouraged me and taunted me as I tried to get back in shape, and, although I was never going to get near the level of health they were at, they did their best to get me as close as they could. In turn, I offered them some of the insights that only age can bring. Twelve years might not sound like a lot, but there’s so much of a difference in perspectives and experience between someone who’s just past thirty and someone edging close to their mid-forties. 

More than that, though, they were both fun. They were nerds, too, of the puzzles and games variety. I joined them regularly for game nights, sometimes bringing Travis or the girls along. Janine and Isabella loved kids, and that was one of the things I regularly talked with them about. Isabella was planning to go through IVF, and they wanted advice on bringing up their son or daughter when the time came.

Alli wasn’t thrilled about me hanging out with two younger and very beautiful women, especially after my comment about her not knowing where I’d been, but she was somewhat mollified by the fact that they were married to each other. And if she hadn't been? Fuck her. The whole point of getting out and being social was to make friends I’d still have after we divorced. Isabella and Janine were much like Tate in how they treated Alli: there was no animosity there, but neither was there a real friendship.

They weren’t the only friends I made there, either, nor was cycling my only new hobby. I had studied Shotokan in my senior year of high school, after my run-in with Evan, but had to drop it when I moved to college. I remembered enjoying it, and I happened to pass by a place teaching Kenpo. It wasn’t the same art, but beggars can’t be choosers. Since I was just looking for new ways to both be social and out of the house, switching arts was fine. It’s not like I was trying to become a black belt. 

The guy that ran it was kind of a blowhard, but in a fun sort of way, unlike my brother. He was a big, brash guy, goofy and friendly, named Jack. Of course, he was named Jack. He was like the Platonic ideal of a “Jack.” I enjoyed my classes with him a lot, and since I was one of the older students, he and I would sometimes joke around after class, which led to us going out to a bar together from time to time.

I made other friends there, too: Tom and Mike–twenty-five-year-old twin brothers that were kind of Jack-lite–and Lila. Lila was closed off at first, but she warmed up to me pretty quickly. Her boyfriend, Trey, was a really nice guy, and another nerd; Lila was so grateful when I roped him in for game nights with Janine, Isabella, and the kids. It meant that she no longer had to pretend to understand the byzantine rules of whatever Trey’s new obsession was. That alone made sure that we were fast friends, but she and I also bonded over our relative ineptitude when it came to our chosen art. I got in better shape cycling, but I had more fun at the dojo.

Travis glommed onto Kenpo, as well. He had gone through a tae kwon do phase as a grade-schooler like a lot of kids, but dropped it after a few months. I attended an adult class, and he was in a teen one, but he rode with me to and from the dojo, and we talked about school, girls, music, and all the other things that teenage boys obsess about on the way there and back.

It was strange that Travis and I became closer after I found out he wasn’t my son. That’s one of the things that always strikes me about my story: I probably wouldn’t have gotten involved with either of these sports if I hadn’t seen that “B” on his charts. If I hadn’t, I doubt we would have become as close as we did. My life had been upended, but it was nice that I was able to find at least one bright bit of treasure amongst the wreckage.

I made time for my girls, too. Julie was pulling away, as I expected her to do at that age, but I made sure that we still spent time together. It was an experience that I’m sorry to say she didn’t get enough of when she was younger; her brother came along not long after she did, and Megan took her slot as Daddy’s girl not much longer after that. 

She was tough and independent, but I wanted to make sure that she knew that her dad was always there for her, no matter what. We had always had a strong bond, but this intentional renewal only strengthened it. By the time she left for college, she knew she could always come to me for anything.

Megan, well, Megan just stayed Daddy’s girl. Daddy’s girl that could kick ass that is. She got irritated that Travis and I were getting to have all the fun at Kenpo, and she joined in after six months or so. That, plus the game nights, plus her instinct naturally being to come to me when she needed help, meant that there was no doubt who her favorite parent was.

I know that sounds Machiavellian, but it wasn’t my intention when I started this. I just wanted to spend time with my family while I still had one. You’ll notice that nowhere in there do I mention the times we all spent together as a family with Alli, although those did happen. We went to the movies sometimes, or on occasion, we’d all veg out around the TV, or even lasso their mom into a game or two. But Alli and I spent almost no time alone together outside of the bedroom. On top of that, she still traveled regularly for work, while I almost always stayed home with the kids.

Allison did have some time just with the kids, though. In addition to cycling, Kenpo, and game nights with my new friends, I started to take short weekend trips. Sometimes I’d bring one or more of the kids along, to go camping or on a long bicycle trip, or to go compete at a tournament with Travis or Megan. But, on occasion, I’d just go by myself.

I didn’t tell Alli more than the bare minimum about where I was going or what I was doing. What I did was none of her business, as far as I was concerned. It took her a while to accept that, but eventually, the news that I’d be taking off for a weekend was met with a slightly brittle “stay safe.” I rarely went very far–usually no more than an hour or two drive away–and I only traveled if it wouldn’t interfere with the kids’ activities. I was never irresponsible.

Well, except for that one time, about nine months after I learned what Alli had done.

On that occasion, early on a Saturday afternoon, I found myself in front of a grubby door in a grubby building in a grubby part of a town several hundred miles from home. After knocking, I heard a loud voice bellow, “Yeah, just a minute!” The peephole turned dark. I heard the sound of locks being opened and a chain being removed. And then, standing before me in all his toxic glory, was my older brother, Evan. “Fuck are you doing here?”

He smelled like beer and sweat, but that wasn’t particularly new. Ever since his wife had left him, he’d been like a parody of a post-divorce trainwreck. That might be understandable if it had been only a few months, but it had been years. Even at Thanksgiving, he was barely cleaned up and sober. And on a Saturday afternoon? He looked every bit the walking dumpster fire on the outside that he’d always been on the inside.

“Wanted to talk.” My affect was neutral; I knew the way this was likely to go, but I wasn’t going to shove it in that direction. However, I wasn’t going to go out of my way to be nice, either. I’d long since moved past “sibling rivalry” with Evan, even before my run-in with the letter “B” and Alli’s revelations. I openly loathed him when social circumstances allowed for it.

“About what?” His eyes narrowed with suspicion or possibly just with the effects of daylight on them. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d woken him.

“Travis.”

A quick flicker of his usual dickhead self showed through for one moment, a smugness that he quickly tried to hide. “What about him?”

“I think you know.”

And there it was, in its full magnificence, the shit-eating grin I’d come to hate over the years. “Dunno what you mean.”

“Yes, you fucking do. Cut the act.”

He shrugged. “Okay. So, you finally figured out you weren’t his daddy?”

“Yeah.” I shook my head. “You knew all this time, and you didn’t tell me. Why?”

“Why the fuck would I?”

My shout resounded down the hallway. “Because I’m your brother, goddammit!”

“Only ‘cause Mom fucked Dad. Jake was more of a brother to me than you ever were.” I stood there, dumbfounded, as he continued, “And, yeah, you’re a little beta bitch, but he figured Alli loved you, and you were a good husband to his sister–no idea what she ever saw in you–and that you’d be a good dad to his kid, so I told him I’d keep it quiet.”

“But you couldn’t help taunting Alli.”

Evan snorted. “Bitch had a chance at me instead of you. Can’t blame me for getting a few shots in here and there. Never would have happened if she’d married a real man in the first place.”

I just kept staring at him for a minute before finally asking, “What the hell did I ever do to make you hate me so much?” 

That big shit-eating grin came back, and it made me want to throttle him. “You were a pussy. I wanted to have a brother I could be proud of, someone that was into football and cars and shit, like me and dad were.” He chuckled. “I usedta wonder if you even were actually my brother, or if mom got around behind Dad’s back. But, nah, I can’t believe that. Dad wouldn’t put up with being a cuck like you.”

I tensed for just a moment, and he laughed. Then I forced myself to loosen up, preparing for what was about to happen. “Say that again, asshole.”

“What? Cu–” He didn’t finish that word. Didn’t say a whole lot for about the next minute, either, outside of “Oof” and “Ow” and “Aaaugh!!!”

Something I learned pretty early on, even when I was younger, was that guys who are big and strong often don’t know how to fight. If you didn’t know how to fight either, yeah, they’d maul you. But if you were even marginally skilled–like, say, six months of Shotokan as a kid and eight months of Kenpo as an adult–along with the conditioning that came with bicycling and martial arts as a way to avoid your wife for nearly a year, then, yeah: it’s pretty easy to kick the shit out of a big guy that never actually learned how to fight.

My first shot caught him in the nose, a quick jab that gave a satisfying crunch; I didn’t know if it broke then, so I hit him again with a follow-up before he could respond. That finally woke the bear, and my asshole brother roared as his ham hock of a fist soared through the air towards me. 

But Evan was slow, his muscle covered over with a thick layer of fat. On top of that, he had either just woken up, was nursing a hangover, or had gotten an early start on his day drinking. Or maybe he just sucked. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I just knew that I had over-prepared for this confrontation, and I enjoyed the hell out of it.

His flailing swing was easy to evade, and I barely even felt the air off of it. The big lug had overextended, so it was trivial to duck to the side and slam a fist into his kidney a couple of times. Evan howled with pain as he reached down to grab me; that didn’t work out so well for him either.

Kicks in a fight are usually a bad idea, but they do have their place, especially if you’re good at landing them precisely. I wasn’t, but my brother had two bad knees, and they were pretty close to each other; he hadn’t been expecting a fight, so his stance was little changed from when he’d smugly greeted me at his apartment door.

Did I mention that Evan’s football career, lackluster though it was, ultimately ended due to knee injuries? That’s how the fight ended, too. My shot wasn’t precise, and I didn’t do as much damage as I’d wanted, but a quick snap kick to one leg, followed by another one into his crotch, had the fat lady preparing for her crescendo.

Evan was bleeding from the nose, clutching his side in pain, staggering, and now he had a pair of scrambled eggs below the waist. An elbow to his face knocked him on his ass and ended the fight–such as it had been–with a pathetic thud.

I was breathing hard, more from the adrenaline than the exertion, while the shithead sat there, dazed, and leaned up against the doorframe. When he finally spoke, his teeth pink with blood from a split lip, he croaked out, “Huh. Maybe you are my brother after all.”

After eying him for a moment, I stood upright and said, “No. Not anymore.” Turning to leave, I tossed over my shoulder, “If I ever see you again, I’ll finish what I started. Stay the hell away from my family.”

It wasn’t until I got in the car that I shook my hands and let loose a string of expletives. There’s a reason boxers wear gloves, and it’s not to protect their opponents’ faces. At least he hadn’t landed a hit on me; that wouldn’t have been fun to explain. Bruised knuckles were easy enough to ascribe to an accident while camping.

Confronting Evan was pointless. Fighting him was childish. It didn’t give me much new insight, other than that Jake and Evan both thought that Alli loved me. It didn’t fix my marriage. It didn’t heal any hurts.

But goddamn, it felt good.

I had a full life in that first year. Maybe a fuller life than I would have otherwise. There were new friends and hobbies, and I was closer to my kids than ever. In private, Alli and I were distant, but we looked like a happily married couple to the outside world. That distance when alone together didn’t extend to our bedroom; while we were still just fucking– decidedly not making love–our couplings occurred only slightly less frequently than when I had still been in love with her.

She was still in love with me. I knew that, or at least I believed it. I was very angry for a very long time, and when I allowed myself to think of her lies, I could still stoke that ember of resentment into a bonfire. But she never stopped trying to win me back, even as I pushed her away.

One of her attempts at earning back my trust involved a wide array of devices, apps, and protocols. Alli put keyloggers on all of her devices, a tracking app on her phone, instituted open email and text policies, and pledged to always immediately answer texts and calls. 

When my wife presented all of these efforts to me, I simply said, “I have better things to do than waste my day being your jailer, especially since I know you’re smart enough to get around all of these if you really wanted to.” She spent the next few weeks under a cloud but never took the apps off her devices. I checked them every once in a while; I’m only human.

For my part, I stopped being quite as paranoid. Having a few more trusted advisors in my circle allowed me to lessen, somewhat, the hurt that I felt. Their diverse viewpoints also gave me some new perspective. 

For example, Tate pointed out, “Yeah, she was a bitch for what she did, but do you really think you’re so dense that you wouldn’t have found anything at all when you actually looked for it?” I thought about that for a good long while. I still didn’t trust my wife entirely, but I chose to trust myself. Tate was right. I couldn’t have been that blind, and even if I had been, there was no way she was so clever that she could have hidden every single speck of evidence once I started to look.

Jack’s wisdom was even more blunt: “Dude, she wants to blow you. If she’s been cheating on you for that long and didn’t even bring home the clap, you should clearly be getting all the BJs that you can while you can.” He made a compelling argument. Oral went back on the menu, which made Alli a little happier. The condoms stayed, though; I did my research on STD transmissibility, and while I was willing to take the chance with oral, going raw in her was a bridge too far.

As we moved from the first year into the second, things changed even more. I won’t say I forgave her, and I certainly didn’t forget, but my rage was blunted. When I first found out what she’d done, and for months afterward, I was furious. But it was hard to maintain that level of anger for long, especially when I was trying to seem like a happy and loving husband most of the time. “Fake it til you make it” goes both ways: I faked affection for her around others, and I found it coming out sometimes, even when we were alone.

And while Alli was clearly unhappy with how I treated her, she also took it almost entirely without complaint. There was no way we could ever balance the scales, but she had told me over and over that she’d do anything she could to make it up to me. Even as I eased up a bit, she didn’t relent. The full-court press to win me back never ended. That could be exhausting sometimes, but it also felt good to know our marriage mattered to her that much.

As we rolled through the second year post-revelation, the love for her that I thought dead turned out to be merely dormant. I was afraid to be hurt, and I hid my love behind the usual gruff and blunt façade that I’d taken to in the first year. But, eventually, that edifice started to crack.

The first chinks appeared when Isabella made me the godfather to her daughter, Cynthia. She had found a sperm donor, and I was honored when she asked me to help guide her child into adulthood and to take Cynthia in if anything ever happened to her and Janine. 

When I held that little bundle for the first time, I was reminded of Julie and Megan, and of what Alli had given to me. My wife watched me with tears in her eyes as I held the baby, and we connected then in a way we hadn’t in a long time. I gave her a genuine and heartfelt smile; it wasn’t much, but her face glowed as if I’d gotten on one knee and proposed all over again.

The next crack came when we took Julie to college. We bundled up all the possessions she could fit in her car and ours and took the four-hour trek to the state university she’d be attending. On the way, just the two of us, we reminisced about her as a child, doing our best to not cry as our first little bird left the nest. We weren’t entirely successful, but we held hands and chatted as if none of this had ever happened. It felt good to not be angry at her, even if I also felt oddly guilty about letting go of the anger.

After we’d dropped our daughter off–with the requisite amount of tears, and after we stopped finding reasons to not leave her dorm room–we made our way to a hotel room to spend the night before returning home. I held Allison as she cried. It was such a big milestone, and we both knew that it had even more import than it did for most parents: we were now a third of the way to the end of our marriage.

Alli didn’t beg. She didn’t plead for me to reconsider; the looming dissolution of our marriage wasn’t directly mentioned at all. But her deep sorrow was visibly not just about our eldest leaving home. She sobbed for a time, face pressed into my shoulder. Then she looked up at me, desperate for any sign of love. Of hope. 

I don’t know what my wife saw there. Perhaps she just saw what she wanted to see, or perhaps the fissures in my disguise had widened enough to make her think there really was a chance for us. But she kissed me, softly at first, and then with more insistent urgency. I responded in kind, and within a few minutes, our clothes were discarded, and I was on my knees between her legs, sucking at licking at her pussy as she writhed on the bed.

Alli wasn’t usually verbal during sex; she could be loud, but the sounds that she made were moans and sighs and gasps, nonsense syllables drawn from a primal past before language. I knew what they meant, though: the way her body moved and her breath caught as I sucked at her clit, telling me she was close; the mewling whine of pained pleasure when my fingers found her nipples and pinched them; the sudden silence followed by loud sobs of joy as her body was wracked by orgasm. I loved them. Loved her. Hated that I did, but couldn’t help it.

We made love for the first time in almost two years that night. I still wore a condom; love wasn’t the same thing as trust, and I needed her to know that. But this wasn’t a quick lay or even the occasional rough hatefuck I’d subjected her to, which she took with an unexpected eagerness. Instead, it was the two of us spending time pleasing each other in every way we could.

There were only two condoms in my luggage, and those were there only by happenstance. I hadn’t planned to have sex at all that weekend. After we’d expended them, Alli didn’t pressure me to continue our coupling. Instead, she slid down my body and eagerly brought me back to life with lips and tongue. When I was fully erect again, she looked up at me sweetly, eyes wide as she took the full length of my cock into her mouth and throat.

I groaned with unexpected pleasure. Alli had been able to do this for as long as we’d been together, but she had never particularly enjoyed it, so I rarely pressed the issue. But now, she took my hands and put them on the back of her head, pressing them into place. My fingers wove into her hair, establishing a firm grip, and I began to fuck my wife’s face, to fuck her throat, forcing her to gag and choke on my dick, to gasp loudly when I gave her a moment–and only a moment–for air. 

Allison took it all without complaint, just as she had the venom I’d heaped on her for the last two years. Her throat distended around my shaft, bulging as she took me as deeply as she could. Mascara ran down her face, and saliva dripped from her chin. Yet when I gave her brief relief here and there, allowing her a few moments to breathe before my cock invaded her throat once more, Alli’s smile was broad and sinful and heartfelt. 

She was overjoyed to show the depths of her devotion to me, to give as much of herself as I would allow. It wasn’t a bribe or an attempt to win me back, at least not primarily. It was more akin to tribute, a gift given to the man who would determine her fate, and one given without expectation of recompense. Hope for it, yes. But no expectations.

I was tempted to finish in her throat, but instead pulled out, jacking my cock in front of her gasping, upturned face. Alli’s voice, sore from the abuse she had begged for, rasped, “Mark me, lover. I’m yours. Always yours,” as she stared into my eyes. That was all it took to push me over the edge. Ropes of jism coated her face, splattered in her hair, landed in her opened mouth. 

My delightfully wicked wife licked her lips, then dragged her fingers across her cheeks and brought more of my cum into her mouth, sucking greedily at her coated digits. And, finally, she returned to the source, taking the head of my cock in her mouth and stroking the shaft with her hands, draining the last few dribbles from me as if she could never get enough. 

We showered together later, kissing and cuddling under the spray. I brought her off once more with my fingers as her voice raised in animalistic exaltation, but there just wasn’t another one in the tank for me. Three times in an afternoon was my limit. That’s not to say she didn’t valiantly attempt to resuscitate me once more, which I certainly enjoyed, but while the spirit was willing, the flesh was weak. 

Afterward, we ordered room service and lounged in our robes, feeding each other as we had on our honeymoon. There was no discussion of our future, nor even much of our past. We just enjoyed the present together. The world would be out there waiting for us when we left, and there would be time enough for fear and melancholy, guilt and anger. But just then, we were Luke and Allison, two people who had been in love and still remembered what that felt like. That maybe, just maybe, wanted it enough to fight for it.

My wife did tease one more orgasm from me, taking my seed into her mouth and swallowing it with a need that, while not as desperate as before, still felt completely honest and loving. As we lay in bed afterward, I spooned up against Alli for the first time in a long time and held her close to me, protectively, like a dragon guarding its treasure. She whispered, “I love you.” I couldn’t respond in kind; I still had a ways to go before I’d be able to do that. But I did squeeze her and kiss her hair. She nestled back into me, and we dropped off to sleep.

It would take more than one weekend to get us back to anything approaching where we had been before, but that was the first real step, the first time I even slightly gave in the direction of reconciliation. I pulled away in the following weeks, afraid of being hurt by her again. But she had been patient for almost two years, so what was a few more weeks? Her dedication to winning me over never faltered. But there was always that fear there for me, and I couldn’t see any way back from it. It wasn’t a matter of love; it was still, as always, a question of trust.

I had enjoyed driving with her to drop Julie off, so I decided to take her with me on my next trip. This initially seemed to be a bad choice. I had planned a long hike but forgot that Alli was no longer anywhere near as in shape as I was. She was blistered, bruised, and exhausted by the time we got back to the trailhead at the end of the first day. My wife had pushed through the pain without complaint to prove, yet again, her devotion to me, and she suffered for it.

Instead of spending the night under the stars in a tent as I had planned, I booked us into a nearby hotel. That night and the next morning were spent massaging her aching muscles and napping together, interspersed with very, very gentle lovemaking. We spent the latter half of the second day soaking in a tub together, drinking wine, and reminiscing. I still didn’t say “I love you” by the time we were back home, but the balance was beginning to shift; where previously it was hard to say it, it was starting to become hard not to.

There was a setback in our healing a few months later, or possibly a breakthrough. It’s strange how often they look like each other. It’s only with distance that we can see which one is which and how sometimes one becomes another. 

Janine, Isabella’s wife, had sworn up and down that she wanted nothing to do with childbirth while Isabella was trying to get pregnant. That lasted all the way up through the third trimester. But then she rubbed Isabella’s tummy and felt the baby kick, and she was in the room when Cynthia was born, and she watched Isabella nurse their daughter and bond with her in a way that Janine simply never could. Her opinion on bearing a child herself did a complete one-eighty over those last few weeks of Isabella’s pregnancy.

And so it was that three months after our hiking trip, Alli and I were once again with Janine and Isabella in a hospital room, and I was once again given the honor of being the godfather to their child. This time, however, my friends had been blessed with a son: Alexander. 

As I held their second child, there were tears again, but this time bittersweet ones. I remembered holding Travis in my arms, the son that was not my son. I remembered loving him and being proud, so proud, to have a boy to carry on my family name. I know it’s old-fashioned; the protocol surrounding who takes whose name in marriage seems to change just about every decade or two. But while Travis would bear my name, he wouldn’t carry on my bloodline. 

Once again, I held a son who was not my son, and a sense of melancholy washed over me. I had pledged to my friends to help bring their boy up and to keep him safe should anything happen to them. I was honored to do so. But once again, I would be guiding a boy who was not and would never be fully mine. I looked at Alli with a melancholy smile. She couldn’t meet my gaze.

The moment passed, and I kissed my friends’ son gently on the forehead before handing little Alexander back to his mother. Then Alli and I said our goodbyes and headed for home. We didn’t talk about what had passed between us in the hospital; there was no need. Alli felt as low then as she probably could have.

Well, at least until later. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Travis graduated high school shortly after he turned eighteen. Ostensibly to celebrate, I took him mountain biking for a few days in a national forest a few hours from our home. In actuality, it was a way to isolate him from the rest of the family and give him time to process when I told him about his true parentage.

Alli and I had discussed–argued, actually–about who should break the news and how he should be informed. I finally won, a dubious victory if ever there was one. My argument, that the first thing he’d do if Allison told him was to come to me and verify everything, finally won the day. We considered telling him together, but discarded that notion once it became clear how close to the surface the emotions still were. For Travis’s sake, we couldn’t afford to speak at cross purposes in his presence.

Travis and I had a great first day together, riding down rough trails that only barely qualified as such. We were bruised and battered, and we had both taken more than one tumble, but by the end of the day, we were in the same tired-but-euphoric state that we’d both shared before in our cycle outings and martial arts practice.

After dinner, we sat outside our rented cabin, taking in the beauty of the night sky. Glancing over at him, I was proud of the young man that he had become. He was handsome and strong; I felt more than a little twinge of jealousy, knowing that I had contributed little to his physical attributes, outside of steering him towards the sports that he and I practiced together and away from football. Sorry, Jake. Fuck your legacy.

But I also knew that I had influenced him mentally and emotionally. As we had spent time together, he became more himself; not like me, per se, but blending in some of the attributes of mine that he had eschewed when he was younger. He was never going to be as into puzzles or games as I was, but his analytical skills and thoughtfulness had sharpened as we became closer. He was mentally tougher than he used to be, too. That was part of why we were there: Alli and I both finally believed he could handle the truth.

With a deep sigh, I said, “Travis?”

“Yeah, Dad?” His eyes were still pointed skyward.

The cheap plastic legs of my chair scraped against the wooden deck as I turned towards him. “I need to talk to you about something important.” 

“Dad?” He looked at me, apprehensive. “Is everything okay?”

I tried to give as reassuring a smile as I could, but one thing he’d retained all through his adolescence was his insightful nature. I was sure he saw through it, especially when his eyebrows raised with concern. Still, I tried. “Yeah, buddy. It is. But… Look, there’s no easy way to say this. I love you, Travis. I always have, and I always will. Your mom does, too. But–”

How eyes went wide. “Oh my god, am I adopted?”

I laughed; God, if only it were that easy. “No! No. But…” Another deep sigh. “But you’re on the right track. Travis, you’re not biologically my son.”

The look on his face almost killed me. It was the face of my little boy when his best friend moved away, of my tween when we had to put down the family dog, and of my high schooler going through his first breakup. Each of the smaller pains that prepares us for, the greater ones we feel as adults. And yet we’re never truly prepared, are we? We never reach the point where there’s not a larger and newer pain lurking on the horizon. 

I saw my son’s heartbreak in a new and awful way, but I also saw all the ways it had broken before. 

My son.

He was my son. 

Travis was my son, and he always was and always would be, lineage and genetics and legacy be damned. In that moment, the idea that I’d ever even thought of him as my stepson made me furious with myself.

He stuttered, “Wh– who. Who is my real…”

No, we’re never really prepared for the greater pains; there’s always a worse one waiting, no matter how old we get. 

Travis shook his head, tears starting to spill down his face as his voice broke. “My biological dad?”

“That’s… a long story.” And so, I related to him the tale of a young wife and mother, so lost in her depression that she made a terrible choice. I told him of a girl who owed so much to a boy that, when he was a dying man and she, a frightened, confused woman, offered something that had not been hers to give, something she had promised to another. To my surprise, he guessed the next part of the story before I got to it.

“It was when I broke my arm, wasn’t it? That was when you found out?” His tears had dried, but his voice was hollow.

I nodded. “I’m sorry. We tried to hide it from you kids until later. We didn’t think… we wanted to protect you until we thought you could handle it. I had hoped we did a better job.”

Travis shook his head. “You did. I knew there was something wrong then, but I had no idea what. You were so sad for like a week, and you took us to that weird lab, and then you and Mom were strange around each other. We all thought there was something going on, but then… then you got better, mostly. But after that, you were away so much, and you made all these new friends.” 

He chuckled. “I didn’t know what to think, but you seemed happier after that, and Mom seemed… I dunno, different. Kinda sad, but mostly okay. So I didn’t worry too much about it. I thought it was just… Like, Bobby’s dad bought a sports car and had an affair. I just thought this was, like, your midlife crisis.”

The smile froze on his face, then turned into a frown. “But I guess it was, wasn’t it? A crisis?”

“Yeah. It’s been… it’s been hard. Like I said, we tried to hide it from you guys.”

The scared, sad little boy was back when my son quietly asked, “Are you and mom… are you guys okay? I mean…” He bit his lip, trying to control his emotions. “Are you going to get a divorce? Because of me?”

“No!” I almost launched myself out of my chair, kneeling in front of my son to hug him tightly. “No! No, Travis. Nothing… Whatever happens, it’s not because of you. It’s…” I sighed, pulling away and looking him in the eye. “It’s not because of anything you did. It’s because of her. What your mom did and– and how she hid it. How she lied to me and what that did to my ability to trust her.”

He laughed mirthlessly. “How is that any different?”

Thank God I had prepared for this. “Imagine… imagine that this had nothing to do with you. That you were my biological son. Now imagine that, eighteen years ago, she brought home a million dollars. And when I asked her where it came from, she told me that she had won the lottery while she was away on business. That would be great, right?” Travis nodded, slowly and uncertainly. 

“Now imagine that years later, I learned the truth: she stole the money. She just straight up robbed a bank while she was on that trip and got away with it. Two decades later, an article pops up about this unsolved case, and I go down a rabbit hole when I realize that the blurry picture in it looks a lot like your mom.

“The money’s been great. It’s made our lives better in every way, and provided so much happiness for our family. Yeah, she committed a crime, but no one got hurt, and the bank was insured. What she did to get it was wrong, but she claims it was a one-time fit of lunacy when she was at a low point in her life. With me so far?”

He nodded again. “Yeah, I think so. It’s… It’s not because of the money. It’s because she lied to you about where it came from.”

“Exactly.” I snapped my fingers and pointed at him. “Exactly. But more than that, it’s about whether I can trust her after I learn the truth. She says it was a one-time thing, but do I know that? Can I know that? She travels all the time; maybe that was just her first robbery, and she was sloppy, and she’s been robbing banks and dumping the money in a Swiss account every so often. Or maybe she changed to a different crime, something less traceable. Or maybe she…” I shook my head. “Maybe she’s telling the truth. But I can’t know.

“And, technically, I couldn’t ‘know’ before. But I trusted her before that; if she had come to me and said, ‘I did this thing I shouldn’t have done, and I’ve felt awful about it ever since,’ a year later, things would be different. Even if she had come to me sixteen years later, there would be some of that trust left. Because it would have been something she confessed as a result of a guilty conscience. But that’s not what happened. I found out by accident, and then she admitted it when I confronted her with the evidence.”

He sat with all this for a moment, then said, “We’re not talking about the ‘bank robbery’ anymore, are we?”

“No.”

Another pause, then another slow nod. “Okay. Yeah, I get it. I still… I know it’s not my fault, but…” He sighed. “I still feel guilty.” I opened my mouth, but he interjected, “No, don’t. I know, I know. I’m the money that made everyone happy. I’ll… I guess I’ll get over it. But what’s going to happen now?”

“Honestly, buddy, I don’t know. I love your mom. I do. I believe she loves me. I want to believe that she’s telling the truth about what she did, and why she did it, and that it was a… that she never did anything like it again.” I swallowed. “It’s hard, though. I haven’t given up. But… But you need to understand that we eventually might end up splitting up. And that’s not your fault. It’s not. It’s because we couldn’t get past what she did. Because I couldn’t.”

Travis had clearly hoped I’d give him a more concrete answer, a solid yes or no. I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t lie to him. There had been enough of that already. 

But he did agree to keep the secret with us for a little while longer. He was an adult now, and he should have a say. Travis agreed that there was no reason for anyone else to know until after Megan was old enough to understand all the complexities involved; I told him his mother and I had decided we’d stay together at least until his younger sister had left for college. He smiled sadly and said, “I hope you make it a lot longer than that.”