“Mark Parker raised you,” Harrison said carefully. “And from everything I have learned, he loved you.”
“He was my father.”
“I’m not trying to take that from you.”
The words were gentle, but my mind refused them. My father had taught me to ride a bicycle in an empty church parking lot. He had worked overtime shifts until his hands cracked. He had carried Ethan through hospital corridors when my brother was too weak to walk. He had called me his brave girl even when I did not feel brave.
“My father was Mark Parker,” I said again, more firmly.
Ancestry & Genealogy
Harrison nodded. “Yes. In every way that mattered day to day, he was. But biologically, Claire, there is a possibility Daniel was your father.”
The room went silent.
I gripped the photograph until the edge bent slightly, then forced myself to loosen my fingers.
“A possibility?”
“There were records,” Harrison said. “Letters. Medical documents. A draft of a custody acknowledgment. Daniel died before anything was finalized.”
I swallowed. “Died?”
“In a training accident twenty years ago.”
I was twenty-four. That meant I had been four.
Memories flickered, too faint to trust. A man lifting me to reach wind chimes. A voice singing off-key in a car. The smell of cedar and wintergreen. But memories from early childhood were tricky things. They could be dreams, stories, photographs absorbed into the imagination.
“My mother never told me,” I said.
Family Law
“I know.”
“She never told me any of this.”
“I’m sorry.”
