However, I wasn’t comfortable with this discourse extending to my own sex life. Even for me, it was a bridge too far. Nothing I could do about it after the fact, though. What was done was done. I resolved not to think about it again. Ever.
After that, I might as well have taken out a full-page ad in NYT. He had everything he needed to know, or at least enough to make some pretty solid assumptions. I had always told him that his father and I had dated in high school, but that our relationship hadn’t worked out. Of course, I didn’t tell him that the reason it hadn’t worked out was because I’d upped and disappeared without a trace, or that he had no idea of Sam’s existence.
Whenever the subject had come up I had always deftly avoided giving too much detail, or any real detail at all, except for a name. Tyler. He wasn’t even listed on Sam’s birth certificate. Of course, this scant level of information wasn’t going to cut it forever, but I’d figured I’d jump off that bridge when I came to it, and work out a way to give him more details that would be the least damaging.
As is it was, in the end, my hand had been forced, and I could do nothing to soften the blow. We were all now adrift in the deep end without an emotional life raft, and we just had to deal with it.
The thing was, that after fearing reprisals, recriminations and repercussions for so long—and despite the less than ideal circumstances, with Sam’s disappearance—we’d all survived and were still around to tell the tale. Okay, so we were all a little overwrought, but we were intact.
I was under no illusion that the coming weeks and months were going to be easy. No doubt they were going to be some of the hardest of our lives, but despite the circumstances, I wouldn’t have traded the outcome for the world—the skeletons were out of the closet—Beck and I had reconnected, Sam and Beck had been introduced, and everyone involved seemed happy about all of it. No matter what it had taken to get us there, I was prepared to chalk that up as a win.
I couldn’t speak for Sam and Beck, but for me, a great weight, or storm cloud had been lifted and I could breathe easy again for the first time in longer than I could remember. Living under a blanket of lies was suffocating and toxic, and no matter what the outcome, I’d always be glad to have gotten everything out into the open.
After finding my diaries, Sam had been on the lookout for more information about Beck: straining to overhear telephone conversations, digging around my browsing history, and even going so far as to unlock my phone to look at my texts. I was seething at these infringements of my privacy and our trust.
However, I also acknowledged that trust went both ways, and no matter how I looked at it, I’d broken Sam’s. Badly. And while part of me was irrationally proud that he’d had the ingenuity to do all that sleuthing, by far the greater part of me felt immense guilt that he saw the need to do any of it.
It hurt that I’d shattered his trust to the point where he didn’t just come to me and ask about his father, because he thought he wouldn’t have gotten the answers he wanted and needed from me. What was sadder was that he was probably right. Who knows how long I would have tried to keep a lid on the situation had he not taken matters into his own hands?
Before running into Beck in that pitch meeting I’d had no imminent plans to do anything to upset the status quo by telling Sam about his father. If Beck and I hadn’t been together when Sam was hospitalized they wouldn’t have met when they did. Even with Beck pushing to be part of Sam’s life, I had attempted to resist.
Sam had been googling Beck and had found out all about him and his work at BR&ND, so when he met him at the hospital, he wasn’t entirely surprised, but what that meeting had done was to expose me in a deceit. Or at least large obstruction of the truth. I had introduced Beck as a friend from high school, which had technically been the truth, but it also hadn’t been a fair or full depiction of the truth. Worse still, that lie was just the icing on the enormous cake of lies I’d been telling for years.
Given the example I’d set, it would have been the height of hypocrisy to be mad at Sam for sneaking around the way he had. I’d shown him the blueprint for that behavior, after all. It was a sobering and confronting thought, and I couldn’t say I was proud of myself.
For all my lofty ideals of protecting both Sam and Beck from the truth, I’d lost sight of what was important in life, and of the example I was setting for my son. How could I have expected him to act with integrity when I hadn’t been doing the same myself?
Sam casually informed the room that on the day of his release from the hospital, he’d deduced that the only reason for my outing must have been to see his dad. Being the smart little cookie that he was, he’d decided to track my location via the Find My Phone app, which was how he’d found out Beck’s address. He had then finalized his plans to get up early, slip out of the house, and make his way into the city.
His agenda for the day had been simple—purchase his body weight in candy at M&M’S World, spend the day at the science museum, then make his way to Beck’s place and hang out. It was no wonder he was ravenous when he arrived at Beck’s—he’d survived all day on his bottomless supply of M&M’S.
I had to hand it to my little Sherlock. He could probably teach officers Lewis and Ng a thing or two. If I wasn’t mistaken, they were more than a little impressed, though obviously they had to maintain a disapproving air, because it was their jobs.
Beck was making no such effort to hide his fatherly pride. If he was in this for the long haul, as he’d said he was, he’d need to work on his parental poker face. He clearly had a lot to learn, but from what I had seen so far, he was going to take to the daddy gig like a dog to barking.
Beck
Based on Sam’s epic plan, his hacking and tracking skills, and the fact that hanging at the science museum made up part of his perfect day, he clearly had a way with, and love for, science and technology. Now we just needed to harness his skills and focus him on using them for good, rather than evil, and he’d have a glittering future ahead of him.
Not that what he had done so far was evil, as such, but with a brain like his, I figured it was only a matter of time if left to his own devices. I thought that maybe I should introduce him to Dillon, and they could talk geeky shit together to their hearts’ content. On the other hand, maybe handing Sam a human instructional manual, in the form of Dillon’s sometimes-criminal mastermind was like jumping out of a fire and into the heart of a volcano.
Just as we thought the interview was over, the officers asked if we minded them speaking to Sam alone, which of course we didn’t. They had obviously wanted to ask him some confidential questions just to make sure he was genuinely okay, and we had nothing to hide.
They took him outside onto the balcony, standing with their backs to the glass, while he faced them—effectively forming a human wall, so that we couldn’t see him as he responded to their questions. We weren’t concerned with what was discussed, so we busied ourselves with our now cold food. I still ate the shit out of the rest of my burger, regardless.
When the three of them returned to the room exhaustion was imprinted in every fiber of Sam’s being. I glanced down at my watch—ten to eleven. Jesus. It had been a long and eventful day for all of us, one that I for one was keen to see the back of.