“She moved to Providence. Transferred to Brown, because they gave her more money than Harvard. I was born at Rhode Island Hospital. She didn’t go to medical school. She couldn’t, not with me.” He let the guilt sink in. “She kept her old post office box in case you ever reached out.”

There was a long silence.

“I never did,” his father acknowledged.

“I’m well aware of that.”

Christopher M. Zane had a hard time making eye contact. “I want to tell you that . . . my decision haunted me. Not that I did anything about it other than drink. I hated myself. I flunked out of my master’s program and had to restart a year later. I knew I was being weak, but . . .” He shook his head. “But the longer it went on, the harder it felt to undo any of the harm I did. Eventually, I told myself you were both better off without me showing up and begging for forgiveness, because what I did was . . . unforgivable.”

“Did you even know that I was a boy? Did you bother to find out?”

His father looked at him, blinking. More tears fell from his eyes, Josh observed impassively. “No,” Christopher M. Zane said. “Once a certain amount of time had passed, I told myself it was for the best.”

“For you, clearly it was.”

“I don’t know about that. I think it made me a far worse person. I’ve lived with that shame for thirty-one years.”

“Good. You should be ashamed.”

His father nodded.

So there it was. His father had been a shallow, selfish idiot. Josh sipped his coffee, which was tepid now, and thought he should design something for that problem. A heating cube that would warm your coffee or tea without making it taste old and bitter, the way the microwave did. Honestly, if there wasn’t something like that already on the market, he’d whip one up and sell it in a heartbeat.

It was comforting to think of himself back home, at his desk, rather than here, with the man who didn’t even know Josh had been born.

“If I could do it over, I would have made very different choices,” Christopher M. Zane said quietly. “When my wife and I had our first child, I went into a very . . .” He sighed. “A very bad place. I kept thinking about how much I loved him, and how I’d thrown you away, and I was afraid to love my boy.”

Josh felt his first flicker of sympathy. The kid didn’t do anything, after all.

“I couldn’t tell my wife, and I . . . I started drinking again. She threatened to kick me out, I got sober, got counseling. Then our daughter was born, and then our second girl, and it helped. By then, I felt it was too late to try to find you and Stephanie. Too much time had passed.”

“You could’ve tried.”