“Who, you mean Jack?” he asked.

Even the sound of the name instantly reminded me of my father and brought an unpleasant visual to the front of my mind. There may have been a million guys in the world named Jack, but I still would hate the name no matter which particular person it belonged to.

“Yes,” I said as I pulled up a picture of my father on my phone that I had found online from an old article that preceded his initial, fake death.

“Is this the man that you knew?” I asked while I held out my phone for him to see.

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said with a wrinkled brow and slight frown. “But how can you not be sure if this was the man you knew or not?”

“Well I never actually saw Jack.”

“What?” I shot a glance over at Rob, who looked equally as surprised as I was to hear that this guy had no idea what Michael’s father looked like.

“I thought you said you knew him,” Rob said. “And that the two of you worked on several dealings together and even partnered on a lawsuit together.”

“We did,” Mr. James said.

“Then how is it possible that you don’t know what he looks like?” Rob asked.

“I only ever spoke to him over the phone,” he said. “We never met in person. All of our dealings were either through phone calls or emails. Even the hearing for the lawsuit was settled via phone teleconference.”

“What about video calls?” I asked. “Surely you must have seen each other at least through the screen before?”

“Nope,” the man said as he shook his head. “All that video chatting stuff is for you young kids. I stick to voice calls and emails. Those things are much more efficient and easier to document. Plus, I’m not much of a camera guy. My wife says I’m not at all photogenic.”

I was sure that I agreed with her, considering that he was obesely overweight and had more chins than I had digits on my hands.

I slumped back against the booth seat in the diner. This was a complete waste of time and energy. And all I could think about was that I hoped Adam had managed to keep a lid on it until we got back.

“Mr. James,” Rob asked, unwilling to let the trip be a waste and feeling bad to have gotten my hopes up. “Is there anything at all that you can tell us about Jack? Anything either professionally or personally that might give us some insight into who the man actually was?”

He laughed and all the rolls of fat around his neck jiggled into a sickening ripple that looked like an ocean made out of Jell-O.

“Jack was quite the sneaky guy, wasn’t he?” he said rhetorically. “He never did like to be in the public eye. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that even those who thought they knew him the most, probably didn’t know him that well at all. He liked it that way. It was just his personality, I think. What was her name again?”

He rubbed his fat fingers against his temple as he tried to remember the name of Michael’s mother.

“Paula? No, Marta. That was it. It was Marta.”

I sat straight up in my seat. “Why did you say Paula?” I asked.

“It was Marta,” he said. “I just got confused there for a moment. Jack used to hang around quite a lot of women, sometimes it was hard to keep them all straight. He settled down though once he got married, I think.”

“Was one of the women’s names that he hung around with, Paula?” I asked.

My heart was racing, and I could feel my nerves burning against my veins. Having the same name as my father was one thing, a mistaken address on his birth record was a bit less easy to swallow; but there was no possible way that both of our fathers were with a woman named Paula.

That was one too many coincidences for me to feel comfortable.

“No, not that I remember,” he said. “Not sure why that name popped in my head. Maybe I saw it somewhere today. Could be the waitress’s name for all I know.”

I raised my hand with my coffee cup clenched in my fingers and motioned to the waitress for a refill. Rob looked at me like I was crazy as I tried to gulp down the hot coffee before she reached the table with the pot to refill a cup that was already full. She looked at me a little strangely too, but then went ahead and filled the inch of space that I had slipped out of the cup. I looked at her nametag while she poured the coffee.

Her name was Kathleen.

“Please, is there anything else that you can tell us?” Rob asked for a final time.

“Not really,” he said. “Why is it that you two are so curious about a dead man? Pretty sure his wife is dead now too, isn’t she? I think the only thing left of that guy is his kids.”

Again, something that made me feel like I was going to be sick.

“Kids?” Rob asked. “As in more than one?”

“I don’t know, maybe,” he said. “I always got him and that old Goldshire headmaster confused. I think his name was Jack too, wasn’t it?”

The man chuckled. “Funny coincidence. One of them had a couple of kids I think; can’t remember which one it was. I know that the Jack I knew had at least one kid though, a boy, I think. I remember seeing pictures of him when he was a baby. Cute kid. Although all babies kind of look the same to me.”

That wasn’t any help either. He might have been thinking about my dad and about me and David. Since Marta had an affair with my dad, I can see how it would have been easy to confuse everyone. A lot of the lines got blurred. But David was legitimately my half-brother. We shared the same father. Michael was not. He was from an entirely different family, a product of Marta and her husband.

A husband who could not be my father.

“Well, sorry to take up your time,” Rob said as he stood up to leave. “Thanks for coming out to meet with us.”

He laid money down on the table to pay for Mr. James’s coffee and breakfast and then we left the diner and headed back to the car, leaving Mr. James with more food than his already engorged body could possibly need.

When we got in the car and Rob started to drive away, I tried to think about what we would do when we got back home. Maybe I would pot some more plants in the greenhouse or do some apartment hunting online with the guys while they looked for their new places. I tried to think about anything other than the one thing that I didn’t want to even entertain in my head. But it didn’t work. We were not even out of the street that the diner was on, when I burst into tears.

“Whoa hey,” Rob said as he looked over and saw me sobbing uncontrollably in the passenger seat of the car. “It’s okay, we don’t really know anything for sure yet.”

“That’s the problem,” I said as I wiped my face with my sleeve. “How am I ever going to be able to tell Michael about this without having any actual answers. I can’t keep it from him forever, no matter how ridiculous it seems. I promised that I wouldn’t hide things from him, and I intend to keep that promise. But I just know that he’s going to freak out when he hears about this.”

Rob pulled the car over into an empty alleyway between two buildings and turned off the engine.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“I’m stopping to talk to you,” he said. “I can’t keep driving when you’re this upset. Lisette, do you really still think that Adam’s theory about this is ridiculous?”

He saw the shocked look on my face as my mouth dropped open and I stared at him.

“I’m not saying that I believe Adam, I’m just saying that it might not be as ridiculous as you keep saying it is. And I don’t think that you think it is either. I think you’re just trying to keep yourself from panicking.”

“It’s too late for that,” I said.

I knew that Rob could see the despair in my eyes. I didn’t know what to think but the thought of Michael and I possibly being brother and sister, was more than I could bear.

“Are you telling me that you think it’s possible that the two of you are related?” he asked me.