Nick had a bad feeling in his stomach, looking at the two brothers. He noticed for the first time that their eyes looked the same as those he saw in the mirror every day. Harry’s jaw was the same shape as his own. But that didn’t mean anything—did it? His mother had told him stories of Benedict Overby until Nick could recite them backward: the day she had met him at her mother’s boardinghouse, their wedding day. The day she’d told him she was expecting Nick. “Your daddy loved you so much, Nick, and he would’ve been so proud of you!” she had always told him, and he had grown up knowing it to be true, and talking to his father, like other kids might talk to God. Looking up at the sky, knowing his every move was under surveillance. “Just like your daddy,” his mother would say sometimes, shaking her head at him with a gentle smile, like when he ate too much pie and upset his stomach or went out to get the mail and came back an hour later without it. “He was always doing that,” she’d say.

“He’ll never admit it,” Harry muttered.

“Be quiet, Harry,” Jack said. “Let’s just go home.”

Nick blinked. The rain dripping down his collar was unbearably cold.

“What are you talking about, Dad? Uncle Harry?” said Elissa.

“Let’s go home, Elissa,” Jack repeated, looking at his daughter, shepherding everyone back toward the car.

Chapter 65

THE MICKELSON HOUSE
502 W. First Street, Pine Rapids
Thursday, November 22, 1945

By the time the boys came in and asked him about it, John was drunk, and still taking frequent small pulls of whiskey from the bottle on his desk.

He denied it, of course.

“Liss is all set to marry him, Dad,” Jack said. “She broke up with Ty.”

John looked at his sons through bleary eyes.

“We need you to tell the truth, Dad,” Jack said. “If he’s your son, Lissa can’t marry him.”

Harry listed the evidence. The timing. The resemblance.

“You’re delusional, Harry,” John spat. “Accusing me of such nonsense. You think I’m the type of man to cheat on my wife? Is that what you think of your father? If that’s what you think of me, you can get out of my house!”

With a glare at John, Harry slammed out.

Harry had always lacked Jack’s courage, John reflected, satisfied, basking in his own drunkenness for a moment. It had been years since he had really been drunk—he couldn’t recall the last time. He was appreciating the warm glow, the soft edges it gave to everything, when Jack spoke up.

“He’s not saying anything illogical,” he said, using the level voice that John hated. “We just need to know the truth. No one is going to judge you. It’s so long ago. But—think of Lissa, Dad.”