A long lane at night

2.PROLOGUE. FUTURE

BOOK TWO: Jack & Nate

** BRIAN **

DO YOU KNOW WHEN YOU CAN TELL YOUR'RE IN fact old? It's when you suddenly become a grandparent. Surely, I've been witnessing my skin getting drier by the second beyond any possible help for the last years, but the moment you become a grandparent, that's when it really hits you how old you are. Worse still, it makes you think all the last twenty-something years never happened.

Only yesterday, Allan, Jack, and I were having our very first Christmas together and now Jack has come home with a kid? My Jack has a kid? Of his own? A real human kid? My little son who I would carry more times than what was probably advisable had his own child to carry?

Oh, and what a child she was! The cutest little thing with those gorgeous huge pitch-black eyes looking curiously at Allan and me, a hint of a smile breaking the toughness of the face she was trying to put up at taking on a new environment.

'Please don't be mad,' Jack said in a shy voice.

'Mad?' Allan actually sounded a whole different kind of shocked from a minute ago. 'Jack, this is the greatest thing you could have ever done, how could we be mad?'

'I don't think I've ever seen you so happy,' I said as hugged him and little Alice at the same time, placing my left arm over my son's shoulders and my right arm going underneath his daughter. Allan came from Jack's other side and held him and Alice the same way I was doing.

'Anything you ever need,' said Allan reassuringly. 'Both of you. We're right here.'

'Thanks, dad,' Jack said, finally relaxing in our embrace.

'Oh, wait until Will and Chad see her!' Allan continued. I chuckled at the dark shadow that passed behind Jack's eyes and saved him from breaking a second piece of shocking news to his poor father.

'They already know, Allan,' I said in a tender voice. Both he and Jack looked at me with a shocked expression.

'What do you mean they—?'

'How do you know?'

'It's been a while already, hasn't it? The boys have been all secretive with you for a rather long time. They did a great job at keeping your secret, I'll give them that, but I am your father, I knew there was a secret there.'

'Why didn't you say anything?' Allan's question was directed at me. I shrugged.

'They're adults, Allan. When I was Jack's age, I was already married to you. When I was the twins' age, you were already in my life. I trusted them to know they could rely on us should they need it. I won't lie and say I'm happy to have been kept out of something so massive in your life, Jack, —'

'It wasn't supposed to take this long. I thought it'd be quicker and I'd be able to surprise you guys, but—'

'But life has shown you it takes its own course. You were meant to be her father, not someone else's. Life was getting her ready for you, Jack. Don't look at your waiting any other way.'

'Is that how you looked at my own adoption?' Jack's eyes were gleaming.

'Come, Jack. Let's have some Coke Floats and let's talk like we never did before: from two fathers to another.'

*

'Your reasoning is totally different from ours, though,' Allan started when the three of us finally sat around the kitchen island, a cold glass of Coke Float in our hands. 'You wanted to pay forward what's been done to you, and that is remarkably noble. We, on the other hand, just wanted to start our own family.'