He knows Katriina is hurting, too, but he’s still upset with her for not telling him sooner. And there is a part of him that can’t help but wonder if she’s not secretly relieved it happened. After all, he was the one who wanted another baby in the first place, for reasons he can’t even remember anymore – just that they tried, and failed, and now must keep trying until they succeed. Because Parkers don’t give up. Kate had taught him that.

If this were a movie, Kate would have woken up last night. Shawn would have come back into her room after his brief but humiliating breakdown in the hospital bathroom and she would have opened her eyes and told him everything was going to be okay. She would have told him something poignant about accepting the things we cannot change, or about everything happening for a reason, or about how we can’t always get what we want, but she would have said it better than that. She would have said it like she was the first person to ever say it, and it would be the exact thing that Shawn needed to hear.

If this were a movie, Kate would always say, and then instead of being sad about life not being a movie, she would just go ahead and make it like one. If this were a movie, you would come and live with us, she’d told him that morning almost twenty-five years ago, sitting at the kitchen table, feeding Shawn toast and homemade strawberry jam – the first time he’d ever tasted real strawberries. If this were a movie, I’d give you a future, I’d love you like a son. Maybe she hadn’t actually said that part, but it’s what Shawn heard. She said it and then she did it. Because why can’t life be like the movies? Why do those perfect, heartbreaking moments only exist in some screenwriter’s imagination?

At the time, becoming a Parker was a scam. Another method of survival. That morning, twenty-five years ago, Shawn had looked into Kate’s eyes and taken her for a sucker, and with the taste of those strawberries on his tongue he told her an avalanche of lies. He told her his parents were dead, for one thing. He told her he didn’t have a record. He told her he had just been walking by when her car started rolling back towards her. He even gave her a fake last name. Some of these things came out, later, but she never knew who he was before he was a Parker. And it didn’t matter – he liked to think that he had always been a Parker, he just hadn’t known it yet.

“If this were a movie, you would come live with us,” she said.