Finn nodded. “Just one question back at you. You seem to be quite taken with Violet’s unsuspecting role in all this. Why didn’t you tell her what you knew? Why didn’t you tell her about what happened with Maribel?”
George just stared.
“Exactly.” Finn knew he was pressing his luck, but he felt he had no choice but to risk it. “Caitlin will tell you I’m not the father. Tell me where she is. Is she getting the police? Is she getting Violet? Is Bear with her, or is he here, in the bedroom with the twins?”
George looked down at the gun in his hand curiously, as if someone else had put it there.
Finn felt defeat wash over him. All these agonizing nights of indecision, of looking for a way out, and now he knew that Violet had reached out and offered one. She would have let him return Bear and go. She would have let him disappear, no questions asked. She would have let him get away with it—with so much—at the cost of his son. At the cost of the only thing he had left.
Would he have taken her escape hatch and paid that price if he had the chance? Would he have given up Bear if it meant he could at least try to save himself? It didn’t matter now. Because George had trapped him here. And he could see that he wasn’t going to talk his way out of it. What he wanted was not on the table for discussion, nor would it be. He had lost. And he deserved to lose. He’d known that all along. George was right.
Finn turned and headed for the front door. Without the possibility of taking Bear with him, there was nothing keeping him here. George had gotten Violet’s message to let him go. George would return Bear to his rightful place. Finn would disappear into the kind of fugitive life that no one could take any pleasure in—the kind of life he deserved. He wouldn’t look back. He wouldn’t say good-bye. This was how it had to end. His strides grew longer, more sure of themselves. He reached for the door.
He registered the sound of the gunshot and the stinging in his leg simultaneously. But before the pain truly hit him, his first and last coherent thought was not of himself, or of Bear, or Violet, or Caitlin, or Maribel.
He did it, he thought, as he crumpled to the floor, his hands instinctively going to the wound that was already oozing blood. The son of a gun really did it.
A chorus of frightened wails came from down the hall. Finn thought he could make out Bear’s cry alongside the twins’. So the boys were all there, after all.
“They are mine, regardless,” George said. “And they come first.” He headed down the hallway, leaving Finn to fend for himself.
36
AUGUST 2016
Caitlin opened the front door and stopped where she stood. Finn grimaced up at her from the floor, shivering under one of her in-laws’ thick Native-American-patterned blankets. He looked as if he’d been there awhile, long enough to attempt to make himself comfortable, though why he would have chosen this spot at her feet was not immediately clear. Behind him, George was standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking as if he’d been caught eating someone else’s leftovers.
“What’s wrong?” Caitlin asked George, and when he didn’t answer, she turned her gaze back to Finn. “Why are you on the floor?”
Violet didn’t wait to find out. She pushed past Caitlin without so much as a glance at Finn and ran down the hallway toward the bedrooms, toward Bear. Finn watched her go, looking sad and deflated. And then Caitlin noticed something on the blanket. A dark stain. She knelt down, lifted the edge, and gasped. Finn’s pant leg was soaked in blood. A tourniquet had been tied around the top of his thigh with an old leather belt. The dark center of his wound almost looked like—
“Oh my God!”
“So much for no one needs to know anyone did anything wrong,” Finn quipped, trying to manage a smile through his pain. It came out as a clownlike wince.
Caitlin stepped toward George, confused. “You shot him?”
“I deserved it,” Finn said weakly. “Just not for the reason he thought.”
“And what was the reason you thought?” she yelled at George, but he turned away from her, his hands over his face. Her thoughts raced, frantic, disbelieving. Hours ago she had signed her son out of the hospital after accidentally poisoning him. Now they’d be rushing back again because George had shot a man? This couldn’t be happening. There wouldn’t be a way out of it this time. And Finn, her oldest friend …
Caitlin dropped to her knees. “Are you okay? Has an ambulance been called?”
“Not yet,” Finn said. “I think we were waiting for you.”
“George!” He didn’t turn around. She saw the glint of something in his hand. “George, for God’s sake, put down that gun!”
Finn couldn’t see into the kitchen from his vantage point on the floor, and his eyes went wide at Caitlin’s words. “Tell him,” he said, his voice hoarse.
“Tell him what?”
“Tell him the boys aren’t mine. That I’m not their father.”
Oh God. Violet said he’d known the twins weren’t his from the start. But had he thought it was Finn all along? Had he thought it was Finn and gone along with that for years too?
Caitlin stood and slowly moved toward her husband, the way she might approach a wounded animal. When she was finally close enough to reach out and lay a hand on his shoulder, he flinched.
“The boys are not Finn’s, George.”
He wheeled around to face her, and his eyes were so unfamiliar, she took a step back. “Well they sure as hell aren’t mine,” he said, and his voice broke. Tears filled his eyes.
“To me they are,” she said. “To me, they are yours. And to Gus and Leo, you are their father, and they love you. And I promise, they aren’t Finn’s.”
“He’s lucky I thought they were,” George growled. “It might be the reason I shot him, but it’s also the reason I didn’t turn him in the moment I found out he was here.” He pulled at his hair with his fists, the way Leo and Gus did when they were trying to calm down from a tantrum. Caitlin had never noticed the gesture in George before.
“The idea of me not being their biological father, I’ve tried to accept that. But the idea of their real father being in prison, because I helped put him there? That I didn’t think I could live with.”
“But you could live with shooting him?”
“In the leg! It’s not like I was aiming for his head! I was just stopping him from running away from this.”
“But he—”
“For years, I’ve waited for you to tell me, and nothing. You think I’m just going to accept the first explanation you give me?”
“And you’ve been nothing but honest? Omitting the tiny detail that you were infertile?”
He froze.
“We’ll get Finn a paternity test,” she said, her voice shaking. “Then you’ll see. You didn’t have to shoot him! What the hell are we supposed to do now?”
George pounded his fist onto the counter, and Caitlin jumped. Behind her, a whimper came from Finn. “Right, so this is all my fault!” George exploded. “At least I didn’t try to shoot him and hit Leo instead!”