Merrick's POV
The question sat in the air longer than it should have. And I was suddenly aware of my own face doing something I hadn't authorized, a flicker of doubt. What if you're lying. The words themselves did not come out. What came out was the silence after them, the silence in which I should have answered instantly, automatically, with the complete certainty of a man who had no doubts.
I didn't answer instantly.
Instead, different questions started flooding my head - what if grief had done something to her, months of carrying a loss too large to hold, and somewhere in that carrying, the mind had found a child who was the right age, and the wanting had become so total that it had stopped being able to distinguish itself from knowing. What if this wasn't her son. What if this was a woman who needed it to be her son so badly that the needing had become indistinguishable from truth.
