He sat down in front of her, blocking her view of his parents.

“Can you take off the sunglasses?” he asked.

She took them off and laid them on the table.

“I know who you are,” he said, his voice resigned.

Quinn wasn’t surprised. It made sense that since he was the one who’d refused to believe she was lost at sea, he would be the one to submit to an ancestry site.

“Then why didn’t you stay and talk to me at the Sea House?”

“At first I thought it wouldn’t be true. Couldn’t be true. I’d said since I was a kid that you weren’t dead, but I don’t know if I even really believed it. Then when I saw you and how much you look like my sisters, I was scared out of my mind. My suspicion that the Lineage site could be wrong was shattered. It was you. I knew it, and I needed time to process it. To find a way to tell them before you figured out who we were.”

“So you’ve processed it now?” She hoped so, because she was about to blow his secret wide open.

He shrugged, but she could see his hands shaking.

“Looks like I don’t have a choice,” he said.

Quinn sighed. She felt sorrow. A deep, tender sorrow for the hurt she’d unknowingly and unwillingly caused him. And also a sorrow for whatever he’d endured in Iraq. She could see pain in his eyes that looked there to stay. How much of it was because of her?

“I’ve heard that it hit you the hardest. That you’re still suffering over the loss of Nama,” she said.

“Nama. You mean you?”

Now it was her turn to shrug. “I don’t connect with her. I’m sorry.”

He glared at her now, his voice turning angry. Or desperate. “Where were you? What happened? I was inches away from you when suddenly you were gone. I almost had you. Tell me what happened.”

“I really don’t know, Jonah. I don’t remember. I can tell you that I washed up to shore, and then a new life began. But I’m not ready to give the details of that yet. Is it enough that now you know I survived? That you were right, and I wasn’t dead?”

He hung his head. When he raised it again, his eyes were filled with tears.