I gripped the fence because the world tilted under me.
"Who is your mother?"
Evan's eyes flashed with panic. "I can't..."
"Is it Nina?"
He flinched.
That tiny movement broke something open in me.
I stepped back and pressed a hand over my mouth. For 17 years, I had imagined Nina dead, trapped, running, or gone because she had chosen to leave me. I had imagined every horrible possibility except this one.
I had never imagined a son.
Evan watched me like I was a storm he had been warned about.
"I didn't know," I said, my voice cracking. "I swear to you, I didn't know."
His jaw tightened. "She said you would say that."
The words hurt, but I forced myself not to defend a life he had never seen.
"Can you take me to her?"
"No."
"Evan."
"No," he snapped. "You don't get to just show up and ask for her. You don't know what she went through."
"You're right," I said quietly. "I don't. But I loved her. I still love her."
His face changed, not enough to soften, but enough to show doubt. He looked younger then. Not like my past. Like a boy trying to guard a pain too large for him.
After a long silence, he nodded toward the road behind the station. "My shift ends in ten minutes. If I take you, you don't yell. You don't touch her unless she says you can. And if she tells you to leave, you leave."
"I promise."
He studied me. "She's sick."
The sentence landed like a stone.
"How sick?"
He turned back toward the station. "You'll see."
Fifteen minutes later, I followed Evan's dented blue car down quiet back roads. The sun was sinking when we reached a small yellow house with peeling shutters and a porch crowded with potted herbs.
A woman stood behind the screen door.
Even before Evan parked, I knew.
Seventeen years had changed Nina.
Her hair was shorter, with gray near her temples.
She was thinner than I remembered, and one hand gripped the doorframe as if standing took effort. But her eyes were the same. Those dark, searching eyes that had found me at the end of an aisle and promised to choose me.
I stepped out of the car, and she covered her mouth.
"Jasper," she breathed.
My name in her voice nearly put me on my knees.
