Page 144 of I Will Find You

“Besides,” Hayden adds, “it’s like I told Rachel—what do you think a test would show?” He grinned. “You want to raise a boy with the Payne blood coursing through his veins? He’s my son.”

I glance at the old woman and see something cross her face.

Then I say, “No, Hayden, he’s not.”

Hayden looks puzzled. He looks toward the woman he calls Pixie. Her eyes are on the floor.

“I never believed my wife when she said she didn’t go through with it,” I say. “It was, I think, the final straw in our marriage. We tried with Matthew, but I’m not sure as a couple we would have survived.”

Hayden looks at Pixie. “What’s he talking about?”

I take out my phone. “I was able to get into my old email address. Here. These emails are eight years old. When I found out Cheryl went to a fertility clinic, I took a paternity test. Two, in fact. Just to be sure. It confirms that I’m Matthew’s father.”

His eyes almost bulge out of their sockets. “That’s impossible,” he says. “Pixie?”

She ignores him. “Come along, Theo.”

“Don’t,” I say.

“You won’t shoot me,” she says.

“But I will.”

It’s Rachel. She steps into the room with gun in hand. “Hayden?”

He’s shaking his head no.

“Let me guess,” Rachel says. “You brought Matthew back here. You were in a panic. You wondered whether you’d done the right thing. That’s what you told me, right?”

He still shakes his head. I hear the sirens approaching.

“If the paternity test came back that you weren’t the father, what would you have done? Told the truth probably. Confessed.” Rachel looks over toward Pixie. “She couldn’t have that. She lied, Hayden. You aren’t the father. It shouldn’t matter. A father isn’t about biology. But he’s David’s son. David and Cheryl’s.”

Hayden’s voice is that of a little boy. “Pixie?”

I hear sirens. For a moment I figure she’s going to deny it, but there doesn’t seem to be that fight in her. “You’d have given him back,” she says. “Or worse. Either way, you’d have destroyed the family. So yes, I told you what you wanted—needed—to hear.”

Squad cars, at least ten of them, race up the drive and set up in formation outside the house.

“It doesn’t matter, Hayden,” Pixie says. “You two need to go to the helicopter.”

“No.”

It’s my son speaking now.

“I want to know what’s going on here,” Matthew says.

“This is all part of the game, Theo,” Pixie says.

“How stupid do you think I am?” He looks at me. “You’re my father.”

I can’t tell if it’s a question or a statement. The cops are in the house now, running up the stairs, shouting about coming out with my hands up and all that. But I barely hear it. I ignore it all. I only see my son.

My son.

I am tempted to get down on one knee, but in truth, Matthew is an eight-year-old boy, not a toddler. I meet his eye and say, “Yes. I’m your father. He kidnapped you when you were three.”

My son is looking at me. Our eyes meet. He doesn’t turn away. He doesn’t blink. Neither do I. It is the purest moment of my life. My son and I. Together. And I know he gets it. I know he understands.

---