A long lane at night

1.EPILOGUE. ALTRIDGE-LEECH

** JACK **

I DON'T REMEMBER THE ORPHANAGE AT ALL. MY DADS found me when I was three and one year later, I was out of there. I do remember the emotions, though. Dad Brian says I called them dad the second I arrived home and I believe that is the earliest memory I have.

I remember the difference in feeling for the first time that there were people looking after me. While Dad Brian always made sure I received a good education and learned anything I liked, Dad Allan was always concerned about whether I was well-fed and healthy. It was always awesome when Dad Brian was in charge of dinner, though. He was far from being a decent cook and we always ended up eating pizza.

When I went to college, my dads allowed me to move to the city flat. It was a large two-bedroom place Dad Brian's grandfather had left him. We lived there when I was little, but we permanently moved to the upstate house when my twin brothers arrived.

Will and Chad were my favourite people in the whole world. They're six years younger than me and they arrived in our family when they were two.

Dad Allan would always say how aware I was of life for orphan kids, though. He says that's the reason why I loved Will and Chad so much right from the start.

I say orphan, but I really don't know if I was one or not. My dads never hid the fact that I was adopted, because they'd have to be extremely dumb to even try it, but they did have this conversation with me when I turned twelve.

'You know you are very loved, don't you, Jack?' Dad Allan said that day. 'And it's never easy, when you are in the position of chosen parents, to understand if the lines of our love and your own personal history ever merge or divide.'

They called themselves 'chosen parents' and I loved it. They said it meant they had chosen to be my dads, that it wasn't a mere event of life. It always made me feel special.

'We don't know much about how you came to be,' Dad Brian continued, holding a little old yellowing box that I knew contained all boring stuff about me, like adoption papers and vaccination records. 'All we know is that your mother was travelling here for six months to study when she got pregnant. She never told anyone and pretended to renew her course so she stayed here until giving birth to you. According to the director of the house where you lived, she gave you away the moment you were born and signed all the necessary documents. We don't know her reasons, but it appears she knew what she was doing.'

'What we want you to understand,' Dad Allan said, 'is that the choice to find out more about her and your biological family is entirely yours. We have given you now all the information that we have, and we will proceed in any way you want us to.'

I stared at the floor for a few seconds, then I looked up at them. They were both looking at me peacefully, as if they could never ever get tired of looking at me.

'I know what I want to do,' I finally said. 'Do you guys know her name?'

'Violet Colman,' answered Dad Allan.

'I want to be thankful to Violet. Without her, I could never have become your kid. And that's what I am. Your kid. You are my dads. You are my family. I want to live the rest of my life as I've lived until now, exclusively as your kid. I'm not Jack Colman. I'm Jack Altridge-Leech and that's who I want to continue being.'

They hugged me and we never talked about Violet Colman again. Sometimes I would think about her, even though I never met her and never knew what she looked like, but I stayed true to my decision. All the times the thought of her crossed my mind, I'd quietly thank her for allowing me to be Allan and Brian's son.

Six years later, it was the twin's turn to have the same conversation. When I found that out, they had already decided pretty much the same thing as I had.

'It's not that we don't ever think about them, the bio folks.' Chad said when the three of us were listening to music in my room. We spent time in my room a lot. It was all part of the 'older brother' magic and I loved being around them.

'But it's like you said,' Will completed. 'For whatever reason, they didn't keep us. Unlike our dads. What difference does it make that we didn't literally come from them? It's them who have been there for us since always.'

'We're the Altridge-Leech brothers, after all.'

'That we are,' I said, throwing them another Coke from the mini fridge I had.

During my college years, I didn't party much and never allowed any of my classmates to find out I had this huge flat with no parents around. What I loved to do was to drive to the upstate house on Friday, get the twins, bring them to the flat and have a great weekend with them on the big city.

After I graduated, I took a minor in History and combined it with my major in foreign languages and started researching music around the world's oldest societies.

Dad Brian taught me music since I was very little and he always said how everything was connected to emotion. When I was seven, he went on a world tour and took me everywhere and I saw people who didn't speak a word of my language feeling the same things as we did. I know I was still just a child, but since then, I understood music truly is the universal language and that was what I wanted to dedicate my life to: using music to create better bridges between societies.

There was one more thing that I deemed essential. I wanted to pay forward what my parents had done for me. Dark nights alone often made me think what my life could have been if it hadn't for them and I wanted to be for someone else the salvation they had been for me.

It's not very easy to convince the government to allow a single person to adopt a child, but I was stable enough, in more than one way, to convince them I knew what I was doing and that I was able to provide for the child. And above all that, I had the best lawyer a person could ever ask for working tirelessly on my case.

My dads once said that my adoption process was long and painful, so I guess it was probably my destiny to be surrounded by the longing and the waiting.

And I waited four years for her.

I was already twenty-six when I drove her to the upstate house right after leaving the hospital with the two-week-old baby. Will and Chad knew everything about what I went through, but somehow, I wanted to surprise my parents. At first, I didn't think it was going to take that long and, eventually, I got to a point that it would just sound strange and embarrassing to tell them after so long without any results to show. I should have told them, though. That morning in the hospital, with my brothers, my best friend, and my daughter made me feel how wrong I was to have kept my dads out of this.

I got the baby girl out of the baby chair in the car and opened the front door. There was no one around.

'Dad? Dad?' The twins called dad Allan 'Dad' and dad Brian 'Pop', but somehow I have always called them both 'dad'. I guess I had fun with it when I was little and I never changed it. 'Is anybody home? I have a surprise for you!'

'Oh my God, Jack!' Dad Brian cried in joy as he walked down the stairs. 'We had no idea that you would be visiting, son, so we didn't—'

He stopped dead in the middle of the stairs when he saw what I was holding. 'Allan! Come quick!'

I tried reading his expression, but there were too many at the same time that I was getting lost. Dad Allan came down looking worried and he stopped dead next to Dad Brian.

I decided to be the one to shorten the distance.

'Dads, I've always known that the best way to be properly thankful for everything you've done for me was to do the same for someone else. To be the same for someone else.'

They both opened a wide smile, their eyes shining and tears starting to fall. 'So, I would like you to meet your granddaughter, Alice Altridge-Leech.'