Chapter One

I had never planned to take the blood test until the moment I decided to do it. In fact, I had probably decided a dozen times beforehand not to do it. But, despite all my efforts to stop thinking about it, in the last few months before I did it, there was never a time when the idea wasn't lurking somewhere in the back of my mind, like a burglar waiting for the moment when my good sense had temporarily left home with the windows unlocked. It was never a plan; it was more Eke a feeling that I had each morning. The alarm would go off and I'd wake up to the sound of the public radio voices droning on about the latest, even more boring political sex scandal. I'd pull myself out of bed, feeling pretty cheerful-as cheerful as you can be when you're middle-aged, and starting to put on some extra weight and too busy at work and divorced and always late for everything.

And then by the time I got to the bathroom, I would remember. I'd be examining my face in the mirror or groping for my razor or just standing there getting ready to open my eyes, and I'd get the feeling. It wasn't sadness. It was more like dread, but a helpless dread. I would stand at the sink and look into the mirror and say, "This isn't my son's face. He's not mine."

I can't say when I had my first suspicions. It may have been from before Sam was even born, thirteen and a half years ago. Every once in a while in the midst of all the excitement and anticipation of the pregnancy, I would look up and catch my then-wife, Joan, staring at me, both hands resting lightly on her stomach, with this odd look, as if she was about to say something, and it would flash through my mind that she was going to tell me not to bother with becoming a father; this was all a hoax.

Of course, once Sam was born, all seven and a half wrinkled pounds of him, the idea that he wasn't mine never occurred to me. Every time I walked out with the stroller, some old lady would stop and say something like, "He has your coloring" or "I can see your smile." Even then, in the first few weeks, when I was still brimming over with the grandiose belief that this new life could never have taken shape without me, I knew that a baby's looks change every day and that, to be honest, he resembled a science fiction character more than either Joan or me. But still it was reassurance; I believed that someday I would see a grown Sam smile, and it would be my smile.

And then one day my mother, Joan, and I were all watching Sam sleep in his crib. My mother was looking down at his face, crinkled up in a particular way that seemed to me the only way a baby could look, and she sighed and said to me, "You never looked a bit like that when you were a baby. I can't believe he's yours."

it wasn't a bad thing to say. I couldn't believe he was mine either. The fact that he was my son was a mystery I accepted on faith, like the mystery that each morning, when I peeked into his crib before hustling off to work, he was still breathing, still pink and warm and clutching his stuffed elephant upside down in his fist.

Maybe it was nothing more substantial than that. Maybe it was just all the times during those first few years of Sam's life when we should have been a perfect family, but Joan was holding back. Maybe it was the way she seemed to withdraw from me after Sam's birth, the way she checked so far out of the marriage that when she finally asked for a divorce five years later, it was an anticlimax. It was just a hundred little things she did or said that didn't make any sense, but that always made me wonder.

I watched Sam grow and loved him more than anything else, loved him even more fiercely and devotedly after Joan and I were divorced because he was all the family I had left. He kept changing every day, and I kept waiting to see myself in him. And that didn't happen.

It's not like there weren't a million things about him to love and delight over. It's just that not very many of them seemed to come from me. He was a nice-looking kid--small, skinny, and dark, with big brown eyes and a mop of curly hair that my mother always said was wasted on a boy. And I'm tall and fair, with green eyes and a thick thatch of sandy hair that I had always hoped Id pass on. People would look at the half dozen pictures of him that I had placed around my office and I could almost see them hesitate a moment before they asked, "Your son?"

And at times it seemed as if he and I would have had more interests in common than we did if we had been matched at random. I'm a senior executive in a high-tech corporation; for most of my career I've crunched numbers and, now that I'm the boss, I review numbers that other people crunch for me. Sam struggled with long division and got a look of panic when I tried to convert some daily situation into a little pre-algebra word problem. I'm tone deaf and never listen to anything on the radio but the news.

Excerpted from The Lies that Bind © Copyright 2012 by Edward De Angelo. Reprinted with permission by Harper Perennial. All rights reserved.