The name sat in the room between us, heavy and wrong, I wanted to say that it was impossible, but I couldn't, because the truth was, I'd never known much about my father at all.
My mother said he left when I was two. She never really said much about him, maybe a few sentences over the years, careful and worn smooth from rare use. He wasn't a good man and he wasn't safe to know. It's better this way, I'd grown up assuming "not a good man" meant something ordinary. An affair, maybe a drinking problem, the mundane failures that break up mundane families.
"How long have you known," I said.
"Since before I met your mother." Dorian's voice was very level, very careful, it was the voice of a man choosing each word with the precision of someone defusing something. "It's part of why I—" he stopp
