I thought maybe he was sick.
Or in trouble.
Jason had this habit when he was nervous where he rubbed the side of his thumbnail until it bled a little, and he was doing it again standing in my kitchen.
I told him, “Nothing you say is changing that you’re my son.”
He started crying before he even got the words out.
Turns out the “story” everyone whispered about wasn’t that Jason hurt somebody.
It was that he survived.
When he was four, his biological father got drunk and set their apartment on fire after a fight with Jason’s mother. She died protecting him in the bathtub while neighbors broke windows trying to get inside.
The news stations ran the story for weeks because the father was a local high school football coach everybody loved.
People online decided Jason must’ve “known something” because he kept repeating one sentence during interviews afterward:
“Daddy was mad.”
His father’s family spent years blaming him for the investigation that sent the man to prison.
That’s why foster homes stopped keeping him. People recognized the last name.
Then Jason handed me a folded envelope.
Inside was a letter from prison.
His biological father was getting released next month.
And apparently he’d been writing to my son behind my back since Jason turned sixteen.