He looked almost relieved.
I turned toward my husband.
“You knew.”
Julian said nothing.
“You knew who he was.”
He slowly nodded.
“I suspected.”
“Suspected?”
My voice rose.
“You brought my father into our house and told me to bathe him!”
“I needed you to see the birthmark yourself.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because if I was wrong, I didn’t want to destroy twenty years of hope.”
I looked back at my father.
“How did you find him?”
Julian walked into the bathroom.
“Three months ago, one of my construction managers found an unidentified man sleeping inside an abandoned building that was scheduled for demolition.”
My father’s eyes dropped.
Julian continued.
“The man refused medical attention. But the manager noticed something unusual. He spoke like an educated man. He knew architectural terminology. He could identify structural defects just by looking at a building.”
I stared at Julian.
My father had been a civil engineer.
One of the best in Chicago.
Twenty years earlier, he’d been working on a major construction project when he vanished.
The police had assumed he’d left voluntarily.
I’d never believed that.
