The Search That Went Nowhere
Chapter 05 - The Search That Went Nowhere
Harold's explanation, when it finally came, unfolded slowly over a call that lasted nearly two hours, Thomas listening in a kind of numb, exhausted silence as forty years of assumed history rearranged itself around him.
"My parents made it very clear," Harold said. "Either I left your mother and accepted their support to save the family business, or I stayed married and lost everything, including any ability to provide properly for you. I told myself I was protecting you by choosing the first option."
"By lying to me for forty years," Thomas said.
"By giving you stability," Harold said, though even he seemed to hear how weak the justification sounded once spoken aloud after all this time. "Your grandparents were prepared to make things very difficult for your mother if she pursued custody. I told myself the story about her death would spare you the pain of an ugly, prolonged legal battle."
"It spared me nothing," Thomas said. "It gave me a lie instead of a mother. Those aren't the same thing, Dad, no matter how you dress it up."
Harold was quiet a long moment.
"Did she try to find us," he finally asked.
"She hired an investigator," Thomas said. "For years. Your family made sure it went nowhere."
"I didn't know the specifics of what my parents did to prevent that," Harold said. "I chose not to know, if I'm being fully honest with you right now. I told myself it was better not to ask, easier to simply move forward and build the life I'd chosen instead of confronting what that choice had actually cost her."
"That's a coward's answer," Thomas said, the word landing harder than he intended, though he found he didn't want to take it back.
"You're right," Harold said quietly. "I don't have a better one. I've spent forty years telling myself a story that let me sleep at night, and I think some part of me always knew it wouldn't survive contact with the actual truth, which is exactly why I never let myself examine it too closely."
Thomas sat with the specific vertigo of watching his father, a man he'd respected and trusted his entire life, finally admit to a decades-long cowardice dressed up as protection.
"I need to see you," Thomas said. "In person. And I think Mom deserves to hear whatever you have to say directly from you, not secondhand through me."
Harold's breath caught audibly on the line.
May you like
"You called her Mom," he said.
"She is my mother," Thomas said. "Whatever else this conversation reveals, that part isn't in question anymore."
