Chapter Seven
Fox
I knew keeping secrets from Haze was a bad idea. We had both learned from past mistakes.
I loved my wife. I wanted her to be happy more than anything.
And it was while thinking of her happiness I did something a little crazy.
When Haze was pregnant with Reggie, I was having trouble sleeping.
A combination of being kicked repeatedly by my darling wife in her sleep, having nightmares that felt too real, and waking up in a panic over whether the front door was double-locked.
Some nights, I’d give up trying to fall back asleep and go down to the kitchen and scroll the internet.
News articles. YouTube videos. Anything that caught my interest and kept my mind busy.
One of those nights, I happened to come across a video clip about a woman who’d been reunited with her birth father in adulthood.
She spoke very movingly about how finding him had helped her sense of self.
This woman, who even looked a little bit like Haze, said knowing where she’d come from and understanding her heritage had given her a peace she’d never felt before. It was all very emotional.
I was not in the best place mentally. I think this was why the beauty of their reunion scene tipped me over the edge. I felt like I was seeing it for a reason. The universe was telling me what I needed to do for my wife.
Before I could really think about it, I’d ordered a DNA kit from Find My Heritage.
Finding Haze’s father was never something we’d talked about; she’d certainly never expressed any great yearning to meet the man whose name she didn’t even know.
But I started wondering whether, like that woman in the video, Haze could find a kind of peace in being able to have answers to all the questions she must have about herself.
And really, wasn’t it a responsible thing to do?
What if our children one day needed a donor for something and blood relatives were the best chance?
My parents were clearly a bust on that front.
Besides, thinking about it from a health perspective, surely it would just be a good thing to know what potentially inherited genetic diseases our children could be prone to?
This was what I kept replaying over and over in my mind.
As soon as the kit arrived two days later, I took one of Haze’s hairs from her hairbrush and sent it off.
I’d had no grand illusions of some Hallmark moment where Haze and her long-lost father would fall into each other’s arms. She was not known for her open displays of emotion.
But maybe even just a mildly awkward coffee would help her know a little more about her background.
She’d always written him off as a deadbeat who’d abandoned her mother and left her to grow up with an array of awful foster families.
But maybe he’d never even known she existed.
Maybe he was a good man who’d just never got the chance to know her.
I might have had the presence of mind to take precautions by registering her under a fake name and with fake details, but other than that, I wasn’t thinking straight.
Clearly, stealing my wife’s DNA and secretly trying to track down her father was a truly terrible idea.
So when I got the email saying there was no familial match on their database, I was relieved.
I’d tried opening a can of worms, but the lid was firmly screwed shut.
I didn’t need to make any difficult decisions, or even come clean to Haze, as there was nothing to say.
But then a few months ago, just a week after Reggie was born, I got a notification.
A parental match had entered the system. Haze’s father was out there. He was alive.
This was perhaps when I should’ve come clean to Haze, but she was—and I say this with deep love and respect—batshit hormonal.
One morning, she burst into tears when she discovered we had run out of bread.
When I was out at the shop buying some, she screamed at me for not answering my phone on the first ring.
Where was I really? Out having fun? Leaving her at home with a newborn, a four-year-old, and a dog?
What kind of irresponsible sadist was I to knock her up twice and then abandon her?
It would’ve been the worst time to reveal what I’d done behind her back. She was in no position to see that my actions were coming from a place of love.
Still, I hoped that finally meeting her father might help her understand more about herself—and who wouldn’t want that opportunity?
I decided I should at least vet him before coming clean. I was in a hole and thought it was best to just keep digging. And that was how I, pretending to be one Harriet Smith, had ended up in a lengthy email correspondence with Mike Martin.
Mike was shocked to discover he had a daughter. He had met Haze’s mother in a bar and they had spent a few nights together. But he had left one morning after discovering her going through his wallet when she thought he was asleep.
I had found out everything I could about Mike online, and he seemed like a stand-up guy.
He was in his seventies. A retired accountant.
He lived on a remote island in Scotland with his wife and two rescue dogs.
He sounded like a kind of perfect long-lost grandfather.
His home was even a converted lighthouse.
I wished I could come clean to Jenny and ask her to give him a full police background check, but a part of me wanted to believe I was perfectly capable of vetting him myself.
Before she’d come onboard, I’d always been the one who did all the research on targets—Jenny might have steamrolled into that role, but I was still more than capable.
And really, I knew I couldn’t trust her to not go running to Haze as soon as she worked out who he was.
I’d taken my email chats with Mike as far as they could go. And now he’d started with the inevitable: “Maybe it’s time to meet?”
I was running out of excuses, both for Mike and for myself.
I needed to come clean to Haze, but it was hard finding the right time.
Mostly because it would never be the right time.
How could I explain to her that, due to a sudden overwhelming urge to try and make her life better, I’d gone behind her back and found her father?
And that I’d been catfishing him for the last few months, pretending to be her?
I’d read repeatedly how exercise was great for your mental health—it was an outlet for built-up tension and helped complete the stress cycle.
I’d been pounding the treadmill harder than ever as I tried to both trigger my brain out of flight mode and think of a solution to my current predicament.
Despite the impressive mileage I’d covered in the last month, I was no less stressed and no closer to an answer.
Sally would at least be proud of me for realizing I couldn’t run away from my problems.
And so, I had made a decision. This was it. I was going to catch Haze in a good mood and tell her everything.