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Wes sighed and tilted his head to look at me.

“He wasn’t exactly the warm and fuzzy papa-bear type of dad, I guess you could say.

In private, I could call him ‘Dad,’ but yeah, publicly.

.. ‘the governor.’ It’s been a hard habit to break, I guess.

But also, after a while, it just felt right.

So anyway, he showed up for the wedding. ”

“Yep. I was there for that part.”

“Right. Sorry.”

He had searched for his father for so long. When he was young, he used to bombard Marietta with questions all the time. And

every time it would upset her. Wes would talk to me or to all of us about it, and he always felt guilty for making his mom

sad. And yeah, pretty much without exception, when he talked it out with us, he would realize (or we would help him realize)

that his timing had been awful. He would bring it up when Marietta was worried about money or exhausted from all she was doing

on her own. It was so easy to see from the outside, especially now, but the fact was, he’d just been a kid who couldn’t be

expected to know how to read a room and choose his moment.

And regardless of her son’s less than ideal approaches to the conversation, I was convinced then and still now that Marietta

never intended to tell her precious little boy about the other half of his DNA. She did the very best she could on her own,

and after moving west right after she found out she was pregnant, she’d managed to build a home and a family and a life for

the two of them in this little Colorado mountain town in the middle of nowhere. But Wes never gave up the search. He just

gave up on the idea of his mom providing any clues.

It was just days after she died, while we were sorting through her things, that Wes found the picture of college-aged Marietta Hobbes, giddy and starstruck, looking up at a handsome congressman in his thirties.

The “McNeese for Congress” button on her dress and the wedding band on his finger painted a rather salacious picture that Wes wasn’t too eager to buy into, but it didn’t take me any longer than a second of staring at that photo to recognize Wes’s eyes and nose and chin.

I knew every single feature of Wes’s face, and even if then Congressman McNeese had been in a lineup with a thousand other potential DNA matches, I wouldn’t have hesitated. I knew.

By the time Wes learned of him, of course, he was the governor of Connecticut and very easy to track down. Getting him to

acknowledge Wes was a bit trickier, but he eventually agreed to a DNA test that, of course, was conclusive. Three days after

they both received the results, Governor McNeese arrived in Adelaide Springs—two days before our wedding.

“And the thing is, Addie, from the time he got here, all he talked about was my potential, my potential, my potential.” He

rubbed his face and twisted to look at me. “This guy who didn’t even know me was telling me I was smart and ‘a good-looking

kid’ and that, hey, I was his son, after all, so of course I was going to go far.”

“He was right, obviously,” I said softly, tilting my head over slightly to tap him on the shoulder. And then, for whatever

reason, I left it there. A tapping head became a resting head, just for a few seconds.

I say “for whatever reason,” but really, it’s no mystery. I had always believed in his potential. Maybe I wouldn’t have guessed

he would be the front-runner for president someday, but really, who guesses that about anyone? No matter what he believed

about himself, I had always seen how incredible Wes was. And the fact that he thought so little of himself had always been

the thing that caused me the most sadness and frustration.

I also couldn’t deny that it hurt, just a little bit, to know he had finally believed it when it came from someone else. Someone

who had been in his life for two days as opposed to our eighteen years together.

“Was that it?” I asked, lifting my head from his shoulder once I realized he’d gone very still.

I hadn’t meant to compound new discomfort upon this already most uncomfortable of conversations.

“You decided to go ‘chase your potential’?” I detected the snark in my tone and shook my head.

“Sorry. I swear I didn’t mean for it to come out that way.

Though, I guess if I’m being honest, I’d have to say that ticks me off somewhat.

” Oh, good job, Addie. That’s better than a little snark in your tone. “Sorry. Don’t mind me. Go on.”

“No.” He spun around ninety degrees and faced me full on, his legs crossed under him. “Say it.”

“It’s really not worth it—”

“Please, Addie. Say it. Whatever you need to say. Please say it.”

I also turned ninety degrees and looked straight at him, our knees touching. “I guess I’m just disappointed. That’s all. I

guess after all this time, I maybe just wanted to believe that you didn’t actually run away from the person who believed in

you more than anyone else in the world just because someone else’s validation was finally worth listening to.”

He pulled his bottom lip between his teeth and nodded. “I get that.”

“So was that it? Was that really it, Wes? Did I not...” Dang it. How could I possibly have any tears left? “Did you not know how much I loved you, or—”

“I knew.”

“Or did you just realize...”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“ What , Addie?”

“Did you realize you wanted something different? Was that it? Because how could you not have known that I would have—”

“You would have gone with me? Is that what you’re asking? Are you asking if I knew you would go with me if I left? If I asked

you to?”

“Yes. Because of course I would have—”

“Of course you would have. I knew that.”

“Then why—”

“Because it was never about that!” He pushed away from the wall and stood, walking over to the chair he had been sitting in less than two hours ago—and yet somehow a lifetime ago—when we were eating breakfast and I seriously thought the most emotionally taxing thing of the day was going to be a tiff with my dad.

“It was the opposite of that. It was...” He stood behind the chair and squeezed the back.

“I’d been telling you for weeks I thought we were rushing into getting married. ”

I shook my head. “No. You never said anything like that.”

“Yes, Addie, I did. Maybe not in those exact words, but I talked about waiting. I talked about waiting until after college—”

“Okay, yeah, I do remember that.” I jumped up and walked over to him. “But we decided there wasn’t any point in waiting—”

“ You decided there wasn’t any point in waiting.”

“No, Wes, we decided. We’d be able to get married housing at CSU, and that would be cheaper. And we knew—or at least thought —we were getting married eventually anyway, so it made sense to go ahead and do it. Remember? I can’t believe you’re trying

to rewrite the history here.”

He squeezed the bridge of his nose. “I’m not. Just... listen. What I’m trying to say—”

I crossed my arms and planted my sock-clad feet. “Don’t try to say it. Just say it.”

“Okay, but remember my disclaimer.”

“Wes!” I groaned his name and threw my hands up. “Come on. Enough already. Just say it.”

“You were throwing your life away!” He raised his clenched fists into the air. “You’d been accepted to the Air Force Academy—”

I gasped. “You knew?”

“Of course I knew. Of course I knew. You could have gone anywhere. Done anything. We all knew it. This entire town knew it. And I was the schlub holding

you back.”

“No one thought that, Wes.”

“ I thought that, Addie! I did.” He ran the back of his hand angrily across his eyes and began pacing the room, from Jo’s prized imperial elk head (affectionately named Elkrique Iglesias by the Adelaide Springs class of 2003, thank you very much) to her framed Thomas Kinkade knockoff in which the leg of a kid in the background was twisted the wrong way and a cross-eyed golden retriever was wearing a bonnet (less affectionately referred to as “Creepy” by Wes and Cole).

“And I couldn’t get you to listen to me—”

“Oh, so it’s my fault?”

“Disclaimer!” he shouted in a long-drawn-out singsong tone that, I must admit, almost made me laugh. But he was so caught

up in his yelling and his high-level angst it would have just been rude. “No. It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I should have

stayed. I should have somehow figured out a way to make you hear me. But we were kids. I was just a stupid kid, Addie. Which, let’s face it, is further evidence that we weren’t ready to get married. And suddenly

the governor was here, and—”

“I’m sorry, I just have to say it’s really disturbing to me that you call him ‘the governor.’ Didn’t you ever watch The Walking Dead ? The governor was the guy with random body parts in fish tanks—”

“I’m so glad my dysfunctional relationship with my father is amusing to you.”

“Sorry.” I smiled at him, but then I saw the pain in his eyes and reined it back in. “No, really. I’m sorry. So suddenly your

father was here and, what? You had a way out?”

He winced. “Ouch.”

Man, way to flip the emotional temperature on a dime. “I didn’t mean it that way. I just...” Well, hang on a sec. “Yeah, okay. Yeah... maybe I did. You didn’t want to get married—”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to get married.”

“—and you thought I wasn’t capable of making any of those big, life-defining decisions for myself—”

“You know that’s not what I meant, Addie.”

“—or at least you thought we weren’t strong enough to make them together—”

“I wasn’t thinking like that then! Again, we were kids. It’s easy to look back now and see how wrong I was. I know that. But

then, all I knew was that my mom was gone, and suddenly I had a father. And he wanted me to go live with him. And at the exact

same time, I couldn’t make you see how you deserved so much better than me.”