Christopher M. Zane leaned back in his seat and looked at the ceiling for a long minute. When he looked back at Josh, his eyes were full of tears.

“I don’t have a good answer for that. There is no answer, other than I was a shitty, stupid kid—”

“You were twenty-five.”

“And as immature and stupid as a sixteen-year-old.” He drained his club soda. “Let me text my wife and tell her I’ll be late. Hang on a sec.”

Josh waited.

Christopher texted, then turned off his phone and put it in his coat pocket. Josh appreciated that. The man took another deep breath. “Listen, I can’t justify what I did. Walking away, I mean. I didn’t plan it. I was taking part in a summer project in Austin that year, and I fully intended to go back to Boston. And then I stopped home in Indiana. I hadn’t told my parents about . . . you. Or Stephanie.” He looked at his hands. “They . . . my parents, that is . . . they were so happy to see me.”

Josh waited. “My father immigrated from Pakistan when he was seventeen.” Ah. So that’s where Josh got his dark hair and eyes. “He worked ninety hours a week for ten years as a janitor and a farmhand before he could buy his first piece of land. Thirteen acres. He ended up with eight thousand. I was the first person on either side of the family to finish college. My mom didn’t even finish high school.”

Christopher stopped to let that sink in. Or just to gather his nerves, maybe. Josh had to hand it to him; he wasn’t tap-dancing around.

Josh wasn’t really here to listen to the story of his invisible grandparents and their American dream, but it was interesting. Pakistan. He was Pakistani. Cool. He’d have to do some reading on the culture and history. After all, it wasn’t his ancestors who’d dumped his mom.

“Is your mother also Pakistani?” Josh asked.

“No. She’s white. Her parents didn’t approve of her dating a . . . well, they had ugly words for my father. So they kicked her out, and they got married when they were really young.”

“You think they’d approve of you walking out on your pregnant girlfriend?” Josh asked, his voice almost amiable.

“God, no. I never told them. They . . . were so proud of me. I was supposed to be proof that they’d made all the right choices. I wasn’t supposed to be an idiot and get a girl pregnant.”

“And yet you did.”

“Yes. Joshua, I have no excuses here. I was scared and selfish and entitled and weak. I couldn’t go back to MIT, and so I dropped out. I—” His voice broke. “I just stayed. Like a coward. Like a selfish asshole.”

He wiped his eyes. Josh was unmoved.

“The longer I stayed, the easier it got. I told myself your mother would go back to Sweden.”

“Why would she go to Sweden?” Josh asked. “She grew up in central New York. She spent one semester in Sweden. She’s a second-generation American. She knows maybe ten Swedish words.”

“Oh. I . . . I thought she was from Sweden, for some reason.”

“Wrong.”

“Well. It doesn’t excuse what I did. But that’s what I told myself. She was back there, they had . . . uh, better healthcare and, oh, shit, I was so stupid and self-centered and grasping at any straws. Call it magical thinking or wish fulfillment or me just pretending she’d floated off to a better life, becoming a doctor. After a while, I believed it. I pictured her in Sweden, having the baby—you—there, raising you there.”

“She moved to Providence. Transferred to Brown, because they gave her more money than Harvard. I was born at Rhode Island Hospital. She didn’t go to medical school. She couldn’t, not with me.” He let the guilt sink in. “She kept her old post office box in case you ever reached out.”

There was a long silence.

“I never did,” his father acknowledged.

“I’m well aware of that.”

Christopher M. Zane had a hard time making eye contact. “I want to tell you that . . . my decision haunted me. Not that I did anything about it other than drink. I hated myself. I flunked out of my master’s program and had to restart a year later. I knew I was being weak, but . . .” He shook his head. “But the longer it went on, the harder it felt to undo any of the harm I did. Eventually, I told myself you were both better off without me showing up and begging for forgiveness, because what I did was . . . unforgivable.”

“Did you even know that I was a boy? Did you bother to find out?”

His father looked at him, blinking. More tears fell from his eyes, Josh observed impassively. “No,” Christopher M. Zane said. “Once a certain amount of time had passed, I told myself it was for the best.”

“For you, clearly it was.”

“I don’t know about that. I think it made me a far worse person. I’ve lived with that shame for thirty-one years.”

“Good. You should be ashamed.”

His father nodded.

So there it was. His father had been a shallow, selfish idiot. Josh sipped his coffee, which was tepid now, and thought he should design something for that problem. A heating cube that would warm your coffee or tea without making it taste old and bitter, the way the microwave did. Honestly, if there wasn’t something like that already on the market, he’d whip one up and sell it in a heartbeat.

It was comforting to think of himself back home, at his desk, rather than here, with the man who didn’t even know Josh had been born.

“If I could do it over, I would have made very different choices,” Christopher M. Zane said quietly. “When my wife and I had our first child, I went into a very . . .” He sighed. “A very bad place. I kept thinking about how much I loved him, and how I’d thrown you away, and I was afraid to love my boy.”