doesn’t,” Bennett said, his voice rough.
“Well, so far mine kinda does.”
Bennett couldn’t argue with that.
“Did you ever hurt anyone?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Dallas said, looking down.
Bennett’s stomach tightened. “What happened?”
“Just a fistfight. One of the older kids was saying shit to one of the girls. I didn’t like it.”
Instantly, that tightening healed. Because if Dallas had that much of a barometer inside of him for what was right, for what needed to be defended...he wasn’t all that bad of a kid.
And then Bennett realized it didn’t really matter if he was. If Dallas was the one who had been punched because he had said something objectionable to a girl, Bennett would still have to take him on. If this was his son, then it didn’t matter if he was the worst little troll on the face of the planet, Bennett had to take care of him.
They were all sitting around this table like there was a choice. But there wasn’t a choice. No way in hell. There was no real choice here.
“What’s the procedure for this?” Bennett asked.
“We can do a paternity test,” Grace said.
“And that...does what? Makes it all official in the court?”
“Yes,” she said. “Then there will be a family court date to grant you official custody. It’s not an adoption if you’re his biological father.”
“Then we’ll do all that.”
“I have paperwork ready for you to be granted temporary custody in the meantime,” Grace said. “He doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“He has this place. It’s fine.”
Nothing was fine. Bennett had a feeling that he was existing in some strange plane where nothing seemed real as a precaution against the reality of it all. A reality that was a bit too harsh, a bit too sharp for him to cope with just yet.
“I don’t...” Bennett looked around his house, which was spotless because he had a cleaner that came in once a week and took care of everything. Spotless because he didn’t spend all that much time at home. “I don’t have anything for a kid.”
“I have a bag,” Dallas said.
Again, Bennett couldn’t quite tell if Dallas was being dragged here on sufferance, or if he wanted to be here. He was wondering those things because wondering was a lot easier than feeling at the moment.
“Okay,” Bennett responded.
“I’ll go get it.” The boy stood up.
Grace eyed him speculatively. Dallas put his hands up in a defensive gesture. “That cop is still outside. It’s not like I’m going to run for it. Anyway, I don’t exactly have the equipment to go live in the mountains. You drove me out to the middle of nowhere. Where am I going to go?”
He walked out of the room, and Bennett winced when the front door slammed.
“You didn’t know?” The woman leveled her dark eyes on him.
“I had no clue,” he said, keeping his words as firm as he could. “My girlfriend told me she lost the baby.”
Grace looked suddenly sympathetic. “Oh.”
“I believed her. She left. Said she couldn’t stand to be around me after all that. That was the last I heard of her. We were dumb kids.”
Grace raised her eyebrows. “You must have been. I was surprised by how young you were.”
Bennett had aged about ten years in the last forty minutes, so that statement seemed especially funny right at the moment. But he couldn’t laugh.
“What happened to him?” Bennett asked, his voice rough. “What happened to her?”
Grace sighed, long and slow. “I haven’t been working with Dallas that long. But from what I understand his mother had drug issues. He was neglected and eventually had to be removed from her custody. He went back and forth for a while, but as he said...not recently. He’s been moving between foster homes for couple of years now.”
“And no one keeps him?”
“He’s difficult,” Grace said, folding her hands together. “I’m not going to lie to you about that.”
A difficult kid who’d had more than a difficult life, and there had been no reason for that. No reason at all. Bennett had been here the whole time. And if he’d known...
“It’s okay if he’s difficult,” Bennett said, firming up his jaw. “He’s my difficult.”
She nodded slowly, and something that looked like it might at least be a neighbor of respect flashed in her eyes. “I suppose he is.”
Dallas came back into the room then, dragging a black garbage bag behind him. “Quick packing,” he said, indicating what passed as his luggage.
For a moment, Bennett felt like he was staring into a black hole of rage. Despair. Denial.
And yet here was this kid who looked almost just like him. This kid standing there clutching a garbage bag.
Bennett had experienced loss in his life. He hadn’t grown up with a mother. But he’d had stability. He’d had a father and a home. He’d never wanted for anything, and he had certainly never had to put all of his worldly possessions into a single bag and get carted to a place he’d never been before. Over and over again.
This was his son, and he would do the tests, or whatever they wanted him to do, but he didn’t think there was a scenario in which it would turn out that Dallas didn’t belong to him. In which it would turn out that this kid, this kid that had been abandoned and shuffled around, wasn’t his.
But right then, with that reality crashing it, it hit him that Dallas was also a stranger. A stranger that was going to live in his house.
Bennett could not have picked a more surreal moment off a list. He couldn’t imagine anything more bizarre than staring down a stranger that you were blood-related to. A stranger who was your child.
Bennett didn’t feel like a father. He was thirty-two years old. He didn’t feel old enough to have a fifteen-year-old son. That was for damn sure.
But he didn’t feel nothing. There was something inside of him that burned for this angry boy standing in front of him. Guilt, mostly. Guilt that Dallas had gone through all of that when Bennett had been going on with his life, making something of himself. When he had been living in this big, comfortable house all this time. With a housecleaner, no less, and this kid had been bouncing back and forth between homes.
“I have a bit of a drive to get back to Portland,” Grace said. “So, this is where I leave you. But of course you can have my number. And we will be checking in.”
“So you can just...leave him with me?” Panic made his throat tight, made it hard for him to breathe. He’d stuck his hand up inside animals and faced down wounded, enraged creatures that were bent on killing him before they let him help them. His brother might have ridden bulls for a living, but Bennett had vaccinated them. None of that came close to the kind of fear he felt here.
“You are his father,” she said. “His father with no criminal record or any reason that he shouldn’t have him. That’s simple enough.”
Simple and complicated in ways that Bennett couldn’t work out even within himself.
Grace paused and put her hand on Dallas’s shoulder. “You can use my number too. I hope you know that. Goodbye, Dallas. I’ll be checking in with you.”
Then she left. Left him standing there with this kid who was a stranger. Who was