Free The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel by Joshilyn Jackson

even have her ashes in a jug up on my mantel. All I had for him was this envelope.
    She’s dead by now, I could tell him. I have this note. You want to bury it or burn it?
    “I ran him off,” Birdwine added, rueful.
    “You think?” I said, half smiling. Birdwine had stepped in to fight for me when I was down. Then he’d caught me up and carried me. Some of the hard, clear lines he’d kept between us felt bent at crazy angles. I wasn’t sure where it was safe to step. I tried a cautious “Thank you.” It sounded stilted, maybe because I felt so raw it was as if all my skin had been peeled off and put back on inside out. I tried again. “Thanks for having my back.”
    He said, “ De nada . I feel bad I scared the kid. But in the moment, I was sincerely expressing my true feelings.”
    “What all did he bring?” I asked, glancing at the folder.
    “I didn’t study his file, Paula,” Birdwine said, and now he sounded stilted. “I wouldn’t go snooping in your personal business.” One line redrawn, but then he quirked his eyebrow and softened it by adding, “Not unless somebody hired me to.”
    “Ha ha,” I said. “I wasn’t accusing you. I’m just saying, when an ex-cop, a trained investigator, gathers up a sheaf of papers, he might notice things. You can’t turn your eyes off, Birdwine. You can’t make your brain not think.” I scootched down and got my feet up a little higher on the stack of throw pillows. Pressed together, my feet hid the returned envelope entirely. “Did you see anything, purely in passing, that makes you think the kid’s legit?”
    Birdwine shook his head. “Legit your brother? You tell me. Did you notice your mom having a baby a couple decades back?”
    I shook my head. “She was in prison the year he was born. If she had any babies, she didn’t think to mention it.”
    “I see,” Birdwine said, and the nice part was, he did. He’d heard Kai stories over the years. Enough to get she hadn’t been June Cleaver. He touched the top of the folder. “Purely in passing”—he paused to clear his throat—“ purely in passing, I saw adoption records. So he is looking for his birth mother.”
    “And it’s Kai,” I said, more statement than question.
    Birdwine spread his hands, like an apology. “I didn’t see anything to shut the idea down.”
    If I really felt uncertain, I had an easy way to check. My best friend was a geneticist. William was on paternity leave for another month, but I could go by his lab with Julian. We’d give them blood or hair or spit into a cup.
    The problem was, I didn’t feel uncertain. It wasn’t only the timeline, or the birth certificate with Karen Vauss on it, or the fact that his birth name was Ganesh. Sure, when I added those up, the answer came out brother. But it was more than that. I could see my mother in the lines of him.
    Julian was my half brother, and I had changed the course of his whole life. That meant I couldn’t pass him a couple of sweetened-up Kai stories with a hot drink and a cookie, pat his head like he was Cindy Lou Who, and send him toddling back to his adoptive family. I owed him more than that.
    His existence shifted history. His birth, his loss, remade my mother, and recolored all her choices. Every story I had told myself about her—about us—had a different meaning and a different moral. I hadn’t cost her twenty-two months of freedom and a boyfriend. I’d cost her a child.
    Birdwine wasn’t done yet. “I’ll tell you what really bothers me. I saw stuff printed on Worthy Investigations letterhead. Tim Worth is a vulture who shouldn’t have a PI license. When he gets a missing person’s case, he digs up everything he can in a day or two—and it’s usually a lot. He’s very good. But then he hands out the info in little drips, billing all the while. He’s had this kid on a string since last November.” He caught my questioning glance and chuckled, busted. “I noticed—purely in passing—that the