Craig had made every wrong conclusion he could have possibly made

Craig was sending him texts. Why was Craig sending him texts? Wilford had thought for certain that his panicked fleeing from the party was enough to put anyone off, but here was Craig, sending him texts.

Ignoring them was an option, but not a very smart one. Ignoring emails was one thing, but ignoring texts tended to lead to trouble for some reason. Goddamn social rules Wilford didn’t understand.

Are you free tonight?

There’s a new club in Vinewood.

My treat.

Wilford looked at the string of texts. What was he supposed to do with that? This was clearly an invitation to a date. Wilford hadn’t gone on a proper date in almost five years. It was easier to just pay someone to pretend. It was also getting more creepy and predatory with each passing year. And it was just one date? What could it hurt?

He could ask what time. And then use that as an excuse to decline.

---

He wasn’t sure why he’d brought Craig home. He didn’t want Craig in his house. Now he knew where Wilford lived. Worse, Craig saw that where Wilford lived was a complete war zone. Andy was keeping Michael downstairs, so as soon as they walked through the garage door, Wilford was ambushed by Michael and one of his dinosaurs. Before Michael could scare Craig off, Wilford picked him up.

“Any problems?” he asked, focusing on not letting Michael use the dinosaur to bash him in the face.

“Just that first half hour or so,” Andy said, getting up from where he was playing some colour game with Michael. “I think he’s starting to understand that you come back.”

Wilford nodded and took the dinosaur away, tossing it into the box with the rest of them. “He’s doing okay after that?” he asked.

Andy nodded. “Yeah, he’s doing great. He’s starting to pick up on shapes and colours. I think he’ll start catching up pretty soon.”

“So this is Michael?” Craig asked. “What’s the story with you and his mom?”

Wilford shook his head. “I’ll tell you later.”

He saw Andy off and took Michael upstairs, where the real disaster was. They’d already torn out the back wall, and would be getting to the stairs any day. Wilford couldn’t wait to get those replaced. It was what he was looking forward to most with this stupid project.

“All right, pipsqueak. Ready to help me make dinner?” Wilford asked, parking Michael on the counter.

He started making that noise again, which Wilford continued to take for a positive thing.

---

Between taking Michael everywhere for appointments, and Craig taking him everywhere else to try to get into his pants, Wilford barely had two minutes to himself anymore. He needed to set some better ground rules with Craig. He didn’t mind him coming over. In fact, he kind of liked having him around. But he was turning into the sort of guy who fell head-first into a relationship, rather than giving it time to breathe. There were a lot of things Wilford hadn’t realised he’d missed. He missed just hanging out with someone all night, sharing space. He missed being able to spend money on someone. He missed having someone to bitch at when his day didn’t go the way it was supposed to. But good god, the guy needed to back off a little bit. He was supposed to be coming over that evening. Wilford would lay everything out on the table then.

Until then, he had another problem. Michael’s doctors kept asking for information Wilford either didn’t have, or didn’t have the power to obtain. There was an easy way around that, but it was rather… permanent. It wasn’t what he wanted to do, but he’d already hired someone to knock out a wall to make room for the kid, so things had already become permanent.

He’d need his own documents to go forward, no doubt. He wasn’t sure what he’d need, but he decided to grab everything he had and go from there. Most of the important stuff was in the same folder it had been in when he’d grabbed it from his dad’s office as a kid. He pulled everything out of the folder to make sure he knew what he had, and stopped at his birth certificate. Wilford wasn’t sure when the last time he’d even looked at it was, but there was something wrong with it. Or at least, not right.

What in the hell was an ‘amended’ birth certificate? He stood in his office, staring at it for far too long before he thought to pull out his phone and look it up. According to Google, it meant he’d been adopted, but that definitely wasn’t right. He knew he wasn’t. It would have been used against him for that to have been true, either by his mother or by Walter.

He looked back at the paper again, and stuffed it back into its folder. It was one more thing to add to the list of shit he had to do when he went back to DC.

By the time Craig showed up, Wilford had completely forgotten about wanting to tell him to back off. He didn’t want Craig to back off suddenly. Noticing that on his birth certificate had thrown him into a strange mood that he didn’t know what to do with, and Craig provided a good distraction for that. Once he put the kid to bed, Wilford even let Craig get a little too close. He even thought he might be able to get into it, and then Craig tried to unbutton his jeans and Wilford was on his feet before he realised what he was doing.

“What?” Craig asked, sounding hurt.

“I—I can’t,” Wilford said, walking to the kitchen. “Not now.”

“He’s in the other room,” Craig said. “We can be quiet.”

Wilford shook his head and opened the fridge for a beer. “Not tonight,” he said.

He lingered in the kitchen a little too long before he got his nerve back to return to the sofa, but by then something had changed. Craig was keeping his distance a little too far, but Wilford could not bring himself to bridge the gap. Instead, he handed a beer over and tried not to scream at himself. Eventually Craig went home on an awkward note, promising to call later. Somehow Wilford wasn’t sure that he would.

---

It was three days before he heard from Craig again. He felt like he should say something, but Craig blundered right through an apology before Wilford could even come up with a plausible lie. Craig had made every wrong conclusion he could have possibly made, but Wilford let him keep them. It was easier than telling the truth, and if it got him to back off a bit, it was worth it. Maybe when he got back from DC, he’d be able to put some energy into making himself not be such a useless wreck of a human being.

Answer your fucking phone the next time I call you

Nichola’s condo was closer to the airport, and even at three in the morning, it would make all the difference with traffic. Wilford packed up a bag for himself, and one for the kid in case Nichola decided to watch him herself instead of dealing with the nanny. While she played with Michael and got him ready for bed, Wilford went through everything he’d grabbed, making sure he had every scrap of paper he’d need while he was back east. The birth certificate was still a thorn in his mind, and something he wanted to investigate in person, talking to another human being face to face.

There was only so much he could look at it before it drove him insane though. He put everything away neatly into the folder he’d brought, and stuck it into his laptop case.

“You sure you two don’t want the bed?” Nichola asked as she brought Michael out, freshly bathed.

Wilford nodded. “I gotta be up early. You want to keep him back there so he doesn’t wake up?”

Nichola nodded. “Okay.” She brought Michael over, both of them invading Wilford’s space at once with Michael latching all over him while Nichola kissed him on the side of the face. “Have a good trip. Get back safe,” she said.

Michael babbled to himself while Nichola took him back to the bedroom so Wilford could get a little sleep before he had to head out. He didn’t think he’d be able to catch a nap on the plane, so this was going to be the last chance he got until he was in DC. He made sure all of his stuff was put together once more before stretching out on the sofa to try to get comfortable.


Nichola didn’t know why she’d woken up, but something didn’t seem right. She thought she might have heard a noise that woke her up, but Wilford was out in the front room. He’d have heard it as well and taken care of it, and probably would not have been quiet about it. And since he was still snoring out in the front room, he clearly hadn’t got up to deal with anything.

She started to lie back down when she remembered that she’d brought Michael back to bed with her. And he wasn’t there now.

“Shit,” she hissed to herself, quickly getting out of bed and tripping over Pete. “Pete, get out of the damn way,” she said to him. He meowed loudly at her, ignoring her attempts at being quiet.

As soon as she made it out to the living room, she realised she’d panicked over nothing. Wilford was sprawled out on the sofa, with Michael having wedged his way under one of Wilford’s arms. She must have heard him get up and not realised it. She also realised she probably didn’t need to be as quiet as she thought, since Michael was able to sleep soundly through that racket. It was nice to see him finally able to get any amount of sleep, but apparently the surgeon hadn’t been able to fix his breathing enough to let him do it quietly.

For a moment, Nichola thought she should try to get Michael back to bed, but she decided against it pretty quickly. She’d just wind up waking both of them up, so she went back to bed to let them get as much sleep as they could before Wilford’s alarm went off.


Wilford woke up about thirty seconds before his alarm went off. With Michael having snuck out at some point, Wilford had to quickly fumble around with his phone to cancel the alarm, and then get off of the couch without waking the kid up. Nichola was still asleep, and probably wouldn’t appreciate the half-hour meltdown that seemed to happen every morning when he left the kid in the nanny’s care. Better to let it happen later, when Nichola wouldn’t be so sleep deprived. He quickly dressed and cleaned up in the bathroom before coming back out to move Michael off of the edge of the sofa and push the coffee table close so he didn’t roll off and hurt himself. It might have been better if he took Michael back to the bedroom, but he didn’t want to wake him up and risk being late to the airport.

It would be fine. Maybe if he woke up and Wilford wasn’t there, he’d do a little better.

---

Finding Tiffany wasn’t difficult. Just like snooping on Linda wasn’t difficult. Her social media profiles were all public, and she never stripped location data from any of her posts. He’d figured out her entire schedule in the time he’d had to wait to board the plane.

It hadn’t been his plan to ambush her at work, but it felt safer to do it that way, than showing up at her apartment. She lived with two other people, so it was no wonder she hadn’t been thrilled about the idea of taking on another mouth to feed. Even on his TV salary, Wilford had only just been able to afford to live in the area during his last few years there.

He waited until the lunch rush to go in. Tiffany was working the counter, but she didn’t have time to do more than glare at him while he ordered his meal. That was good. It meant she knew he was here, and wanting to talk to her. According to what he’d been able to dig up, she’d be getting off in about an hour. That gave him plenty of time to sit down and do a little more digging around before she came to shout at him some more. He wanted to find more on her parents, but they weren’t very social people as far as the internet was concerned. Her mom had a LifeInvader profile that hadn’t been posted to in three years. Dad had one that had never been posted to at all, aside from once when he seemed to have confused a wall post for Google. But that was fine. He’d be a little more direct about finding out about them later.

As soon as the hour ticked over, Wilford found himself being ambushed at his table.

“What are you doing here?” Tiffany demanded.

Wilford closed his laptop and looked up at her. “You weren’t answering my calls,” he said.

“So you flew all the way out here to bother me at work?” Tiffany demanded. She was trying to keep her voice down, but it wasn’t working. People were already looking over at them.

Wilford stood, gathering up his laptop and his trash. “Let’s not get you fired,” he said, nodding toward the door.

“Please,” Tiffany agreed.

Wilford threw his trash away as the two of them walked outside toward his car. The parking lot had emptied out a bit since he’d arrived, but not enough for Wilford to know which, if any, of the cars there might have belonged to her. He didn’t see the red SUV she’d been driving in LS, but that wasn’t exactly surprising, since he doubted she’d driven all the way out there with the kid.

“What’s so goddamn important that you’d come all the way out here to bother me?” Tiffany asked. “And where’s Michael?”

“At home,” Wilford said.

“Alone?”

“No.” God, why did everyone keep asking stupid questions. Wilford checked his watch. “He’s probably with the nanny right now. Which is why I’ve been trying to call you all month. The kid’s got no vax history, or any medical history at all, and I’m pretty sure you noticed that he doesn’t talk.”

“I told you, I gave you everything I could find.” Tiffany said. She started digging through her purse, flashing a bus pass.

Wilford nodded toward the car, unlocking it. “Get in. I’ll give you a ride,” he said.

“To where?” Tiffany asked.

“Wherever the fuck that bus pass was going to take you two hours to get to,” Wilford pointed out.

Tiffany stalled, grumbling to herself before she finally walked around the car to the passenger side. She threw herself into the seat and tossed her bag onto the floor. Wilford waited until the doors were both closed before he asked what he’d come to ask.

“Does she know who her father is?” he asked.

Tiffany didn’t answer right away. “I—no. We tried to pass her off as my sister, but she caught on pretty quick. But no. She doesn’t know anything specific.”

Wilford nodded. “She looks like me, then?” he asked.

Tiffany nodded. “Yeah. That cat was never going to stay in the bag for very long. When she was about eight, she asked if Mom had a secret boyfriend.”

It wasn’t funny, but Wilford was trying not to laugh all the same. He tried to cover it up by starting the car, but the way Tiffany was glaring at him said all it needed to say.

“We need to keep it that way,” he said as he pulled out of the spot. “So I need you to go talk to her.”

“Why me?” Tiffany asked.

Wilford sighed and looked at her. Both because the answer was obvious, and because he didn’t know which direction he should be turning out of the parking lot.

“Oh. Left,” she said quickly.

“If she finds out where that boy is, and who has him, it’s going to end badly for everyone,” Wilford said, turning onto the road. “If I go in there, that’s going to give her everything she needs to know. I need to know what was going on in that house, what that kid’s been exposed to, and what the full custody arrangement is. I can get the latter myself, but I can’t get the first two without fucking everything up down the line.”

“What happened to finding someone else to take him?” Tiffany asked.

“That’s not happening.”

Tiffany stared at him for a long moment. “Seriously? You’re not adopting him?”

“Thinking about it,” Wilford says.

She was silent for a long while after that.

“I can’t go talk to her,” she said eventually.

“No. I can’t go talk to her. You don’t want to. That kid is fucked up ten ways to Sunday, and I need to know what I’m dealing with.” As he stopped at a light, he pulled out a cigarette and lit up. “I’d also really like to know why I was never told about her in the first place.”

“Dad didn’t want you around,” Tiffany said. “You were a fourteen-year-old felon. Nobody wanted you around. Take a right up here.”

Wilford nodded. It didn’t take a genius to know that nobody wanted him around, even then. “My folks were well off. You could have squeezed them for cash. Why didn’t you?”

“Because then you’d find out. They were afraid you might do something to her. Or me, if you found out.”

“I was stupid, but not that stupid,” Wilford pointed out. “But that’s why they didn’t want the boy, isn’t it?”

Tiffany nodded. “She said she’d kill whoever’d taken him. She disappeared when she was seventeen. I don’t know what she was doing. I thought I’d finally be able to start getting back on track after that. Tried to get my GED, but I couldn’t afford to go to school and work full time to pay the bills. Then she showed back up one day, seven months pregnant, with Brian hanging off her like a leach. God knows what she was on. We tried to convince her to give Mikey up. We’d even got her to sign papers and everything. But then he was born, and when they tried to take him, she lost her mind. That poor couple thought they were getting a baby, but…”

Nothing about it sounded surprising in the least. Wilford had done the same thing enough times to know what was going through her mind. With enough practise, he’d been getting better at not flying into a rage when he felt like something had been taken from him, but it still wasn’t easy.

“So you know why I can’t go talk to her. And also why that kid’s name needs to be changed tomorrow,” Wilford said. “I’ve got a good lawyer. He’ll get the records sealed. But first I need to make goddamn sure that the whole thing will be legal, and she doesn’t have any rights to the kid.” He reached over to the glove box and pulled an envelope out of it.

“She needs to sign this,” he said, handing it to Tiffany. “The state may have taken rights, but this will make sure there’s no loophole for her to go through.”

Tiffany pulled the papers out to look at them. “You’re really serious about this.”

“I know what’s going through her head, and it’s nothing good.”

He could feel Tiffany looking at him. He could almost hear what she was thinking. “So what happened to you?” she asked finally. “How come you’re able to live in a nice house in the middle of Vinewood, and she’s in prison?”

Wilford glanced over at her. “Didn’t like being in jail. That was enough incentive to start trying to get my shit together.”

Tiffany sighed. “We bailed her out more times than I could count. Maybe we should have let her stay.”

Wilford wasn’t going to offer up any wisdom about what they should or shouldn’t have done ten years ago. That ship had already sailed, and there was little either of them could do about it without doing something monumentally stupid. He followed Tiffany’s directions back to her apartment, taking the rest of the ride in a heavy silence. He dropped her off in the parking lot of her building, making sure she had the envelope he’d given her.

“Make sure she signs that. I’ve got to swing by the county office, and I’ve got an appointment tomorrow for something else. I might not answer the phone, but let me know if anything comes up.”

Tiffany nodded. “You’re really going to adopt him and hide him away out there?” she asked, getting out of the car.

Wilford nodded. “I don’t see any other choice. Do you?”

She sighed again. “No. I’ll talk to her tomorrow.”

She closed the door, leaving him alone in the car. That was the hard part taken care of, at least.

---

Wilford was glad he’d made an appointment, because the walk-in line was not going to get cleared before the office closed. He walked up to the sign-in desk, and was immediately directed to the office he was supposed to go to. It wasn’t so much of an office as one of the cubicles in a sea of cubicles behind a door. The girl at the desk seemed like she’d been ready to leave four hours ago.

“Hi. How can I help you?” she asked, trying to sound peppy, when all she sounded was exhausted.

Wilford pulled his birth certificate out of his folder and handed it over. “I’m trying to figure out what this is all about. I feel like I’d remember if I’d got anything changed on this.”

She took the paper and looked over it. “Okay. Let’s take a look. You’ve never been married?”

Wilford shook his head.

She put the certificate down and started tapping out something on her keyboard. “Is this an original copy?”

“I think so. It’s the one I grabbed from my folks when I moved out,” Wilford said.

She looked over at the certificate again. “Are your parents immigrants?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Wilford said. He thought about correcting that to the past tense, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

The clerk smiled. “What’s your social?” she asked.

Wilford pulled the card out of his folder and handed it over. “You seen this before?” he asked.

She entered his number into her system and handed the card back. “A couple times. People like to give their children traditional names, and then change their minds later. Sometimes the kids are in on it. Sometimes it happens before they’re old enough to have an opinion.” She nodded and clicked around with her mouse a few times. “Yep, name change in 1982.”

“What?” Wilford asked. Why was this the first time he was hearing about it?

The clerk sent something to the printer, and handed him the still-warm sheet as soon as it hit the tray. There was some information on the sheet that didn’t make a lot of sense, but neither did the entire situation. Jung Won-Jae? What? If it happened before he was two, it made sense that he didn’t remember any of this happening, but he couldn’t figure out why nobody would have told him down the road. Why was he 38 years old and only just now learning this information?

“They could do this? Just change a kid’s name like that?” he asked. “For no reason?”

The clerk nodded. “Yeah. Sometimes parents don’t like the name, or their kid doesn’t like the name. Sometimes it causes problems in school.”

Wilford wouldn’t have been in school at the time, but Walter would have been. Which meant Walter was old enough to have known about this, and had kept that information to himself.

“Thanks,” Wilford said distantly, filing everything away into his folder as his phone rang. He grabbed his phone, intending to mute it until he saw that Nichola was trying to Facetime him.

“Yeah, what?” he asked, trying to juggle the phone and fish out his wallet at the same time. On the other end, Michael was screaming bloody murder.

“I think he’s figured out you’re not coming home,” Nichola said, sounding exhausted. She was still at home. She hadn’t even gone into the studio.

Wilford sighed. “Give him the phone,” he said, handing over his credit card so he could pay for the documents. “Sorry about this.”

The clerk smiled again as she took the card to run to run it. As soon as Michael had the phone and could see the screen, he started to calm down a little bit.

“Hey, what’s all this noise?” Wilford said. “Why’re you being such a pain in the ass?”

Michael still didn’t seem like he was going to stop crying any time soon. “Da da da.”

“Oh my god!” Nichola said in the background. “That’s right! That’s daddy!”

Wilford could see the clerk trying not to laugh. Wilford wanted to crawl into a hole. He couldn’t believe he was actually going to sign up to do this for the rest of his life. “Take him back to my place,” he said. “I’ll call you when I get to the hotel.”

“Where are you?” Nichola asked, taking the phone back.

“Nowhere. Let him play with the dogs for a little bit. That should distract him.”

“Okay. Sorry about this.”

She hung up, taking the noise with her. Wilford took a moment to just breathe before he looked back at the clerk. “Thanks,” he said, taking his credit card back. “There’s nothing I need to do about this, right?” he asked.

The clerk shook her head. “Nope. I hope everything works out for you.”

Wilford groaned and got up. Nothing was working out, and didn’t seem like it was going to any time soon.

---

Tiffany was already waiting in the hotel lobby when Wilford got back from his interview. Somehow, he was surprised that she’d actually shown up at all. He was expecting to have to chase her down again.

“It wasn’t easy,” she said, handing him the envelope.

Wilford sat down in one of the chairs and opened the envelope to check the papers. Everything was signed and witnessed just like it was supposed to be. He nodded and put them back where they’d be safe.

“Good,” he said. “I think that’s everything. I’ll go home and start the process.”

“Just like that?” she asked.

Wilford nodded and pulled his chequebook out of his inventory. “Just like that,” he said, starting to write one out. He paused halfway through to check his figures. He finished writing out the cheque and handed it over, along with one of his personal business cards.

“What’s this for?” Tiffany asked.

“Quit that dead end job. Get your GED. Go to school. Send the bills there,” he said.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because I don’t like having people pissed off at me when it’s something I can fix,” Wilford said. “Short of doing it all over again, this is the best I can do.”

She stared at the cheque for a long time. “Would you?” she asked. “Go back and do it all over again?”

There were several ways Wilford could answer that question. “Remember what I said about trying to stay out of jail?” he asked, getting up. He watched Tiffany for a moment longer. She was angry again, but she hid it quickly. She wanted him to go back.

“Nothing changed, did it?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Tried three times. Didn’t go to one party, and you were there at another one, and hormones are a bitch.”

There was a question hanging in the air that Wilford wasn’t sure he wanted the answer to. He felt like he’d remember doing something like that, but it was a long time ago.

“We were both drunk,” she said, obviously able to read what he was thinking. “Drunk, and stupid, and fourteen.”

Wilford nodded. That was an answer he could accept. “Answer your fucking phone the next time I call you,” he said, turning toward the elevator.