“Can I just ask a question?” I say, not allowing Debbie to answer. “Why did Gemma wait until after he died to tell anyone about Decker having a son? Doesn’t that seem a little too convenient? Like, how easy to poach a grieving family that also happens to be super well-off? I’m just struggling with the authenticity and the timing of all of this.”

She waits for me to finish blowing my nose, then responds.

“I mean, don’t think for one minute that we didn’t consider that. But like I said, we’ve never given her a penny and she’s never asked. The girl keeps to herself. She hardly accepts the gifts we give Aiden and even scheduling these weekly summer pool dates is like pulling teeth. She feels like she is inconveniencing us. She never sticks around. She feels like she’s intruding. I have to remind her constantly, ‘That’s my blood. That’s my grandbaby. It’s fine!’ But then Kurt reassures me. Gemma’s not our daughter-in-law and she knows that. She doesn’t have to invite us over. She doesn’t have to stay for dinner. She doesn’t have to tell us what she’s up to these days, where she’s working, things like that. She’s sweet enough to us, but there’s no intimacy. It’s probably pretty confusing for A, don’t you think?”

I listen to her put it like that and feel for the moment she realized she had been a grandmother for years and never even knew it. Her son was alive, in a way, this whole time and she never knew it. Then when she finally found out, she didn’t automatically just get Super-Grandma powers. After all that, Debbie doesn’t even get to be a normal grandmother. The situation is laced with muddiness and complexity and, honestly, I don’t envy the fact she has to navigate this.

“Are you not angry about any of this?” I question.

“At whom should I be angry? Decker for having a child out of wedlock and never telling us? He was an adult at the time. He made a mistake that he thought he had corrected. How can I fault him? Or should I be mad at Gemma for not going through with the adoption? I can’t change that. I never knew about it to intervene in the first place. So that leaves being upset at her for not telling us sooner? Gemma thought she could handle being a mother on her own. And maybe she could have gotten through her hard times without any help if she just grinned and bore it, but the fact is...for whatever reason...she spoke up and now we know. Now it’s real. Think of the alternative. I could have gone my whole life never knowing that a part of Decker was still out there. So, no, I’m not mad. I’m grateful and I have been since these results came in.”

She flips to the back of the photo album. Tucked into one of the plastic page protectors, there’s a piece of paper that she slides out and hands to me. It’s doesn’t take more than a three-second look to see that it’s a positive paternity test. It’s the kind of information that makes things final, but it doesn’t make them any simpler. I fold it back up and hand it to her.