The first page was the paternity report.
He read the heading.
Then the names.
Then the conclusion.
His eyes lifted slowly toward me.
“All five?”
“Yes.”
Grant looked at the children again.
For the first time, the shock on his face was not about whether they were his.
It was about how much of their lives had already happened without him.
Then he turned to the second document.
The old hotel folio.
Vanessa took one involuntary step backward.
Grant noticed.
So did I.
He looked at the page.
Then at Vanessa.
And finally, after ten years, he asked the question he should have asked before ending our marriage.
“What exactly did you know?”
Grant stood beside his father’s grave holding the hotel folio in one hand and the paternity report in the other. For several seconds, he said nothing, but his attention had already shifted away from me and toward Vanessa.
“What exactly did you know?”
Vanessa looked at me before answering him, and Grant noticed immediately. Instead of denying anything, she seemed to be checking my face first, as though she needed to know how much I was prepared to reveal.
“I knew what Savannah told everyone back then,” she said.
Grant’s expression hardened. “That isn’t what I asked.”
Vanessa crossed her arms and reminded him that they were standing at a funeral, but Grant did not look away from her. He lowered his eyes to the papers again and asked whether she had known the hotel was being used for a military training event.
Vanessa hesitated before admitting that she knew there had been some kind of training. Then she quickly added that I had still been seen at the hotel with another man, as if that single detail could restore the certainty she had carried for ten years.
