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"Mom says you're our dad," he says.

"And she says we can ask you. Can we call you Dad?"

Ross opens his mouth and nothing comes out. He presses his hand flat against the desk. When he finally answers, his voice is rough and uneven, and it's the most unguarded sound I've ever heard him make.

"Yes," he says. "I'd like that more than anything."

Miles cheers. Wells doesn't say anything, but he leans closer to the screen and looks at Ross the way he looks at a chessboard when he's finally worked out the move he's going to make.

"When are you coming back?" Wells asks.

It's the same question he asked that first afternoon at the front door. Only this time, Ross doesn't look at me for permission before he answers.

"Monday," he says. "I promise."

I sit on the floor of my sons' bedroom with the phone in my hands and watch the three of them, and I understand something I spent years refusing to see. I kept that word from Ross because I thought it was mine to give or withhold. It never was. It belongs to Wells and Miles just as much as it belongs to him, and tonight, they're the ones who decided to give it away.

***

The results arrive on Monday morning in a two-line email from Katherine Wolfe's office:

Probability of paternity: 99.99 percent.

Formal documentation to follow.

I read it standing at the kitchen counter and feel nothing at all. It isn't news. It's a stranger in London confirming what my sons' faces have been telling me for the past seven years.

Ross's flight lands that afternoon, and he's at my door by six. Miles hits him at full speed before he's even through the doorway, and Ross catches him and lifts him off the ground. Wells hangs back for a moment, then walks over and stands close enough that his shoulder touches Ross's arm. Ross puts his free hand on the back of Wells's head, and none of them says anything for a long moment. I have to turn away and pretend to check something on the stove.

We have dinner. The boys talk over each other, telling him about camp and a new robot design and a chess problem Wells solved on his own. Ross listens to every word as though nothing else in the world exists. For almost two hours, it feels like the Sunday at Dolores Park, before the man with the camera.

Then the boys go to bed, and Ross comes back downstairs carrying the leather folder he left by the door.

I know that folder. Not this one specifically, but I know what it is. I watched folders like it arrive on Charles Kensington's desk every morning of the months I worked in their library, and I watched them take over Ross's life in a single week after his father died.

He sets it on the kitchen table and opens it.

"I want to talk to you about what comes next," he says.

"I've spent the last few days thinking about nothing else."

"Okay," I say carefully.

"The first thing is security. The detail stays, permanently, not just until the story dies down. The boys are going to be recognizable for the rest of their lives, and I won't take chances with that." He turns a page.

"Arthur is drafting trusts for both of them this week. Education, healthcare, everything they'll ever need, protected and independent of anything else that happens."

He's speaking quickly, the way he does when he's already decided something and is simply walking you through the steps. I don't interrupt. I want to see how far it goes.

"I think the boys should be in London," he says.

"Not immediately, but before the school year starts or at least by the second semester. There's a house two streets from my mother's. The school Sebastian and I attended has already said it can take them this fall. They'd have their grandmother, their uncle, their cousin when he's born. We'd set up structured travel so they could come back to California as often as they wanted to see your friends and to Illinois to see your parents." He looks up at me.

"And you wouldn't have to worry about the firm. You could advise from London, or not at all if you'd rather have the time with them. Whatever you want."

Whatever I want. As though he's handing me a menu for a life he's already ordered. I realize my hands are shaking, so I press them flat against the counter.

"Is that everything?"