Ryan's mind would not stay still. It kept circling back to Maddie's eyes. He and Jaimie both had brown eyes, plain and dark, but Maddie's were blue, a clear, pale blue that had always drawn comments from strangers in grocery lines. Where'd she get those beautiful blue eyes? People would ask, and Jaimie would laugh and say something about her paternal grandmother. Ryan had never questioned it. Now he saw those same eyes looking back at him from the other side of the cage, bloodshot and wide above the gag, and he could not make himself look away. Marcus was Hayley's boy from her first marriage, ten years old and desperate to be the next Eddie Van Halen, and Doug loved him like his own. Marcus looked nothing like Doug. But Maddie did. The more Ryan envisioned it, the more he saw the resemblance: the set of the jaw, the crooked half-smile, the way her eyebrows lifted when she was pleased with herself. He had watched it for four years and never once put it together.
His eyes went to the drawer beneath the window, and the dull shape of the revolver inside it. No. He would not do it. He had never killed anything bigger than a deer, and he would not start with the man who had sat beside him in the cafeteria at fifteen, who had stood next to him at his wedding, who had worked the line beside him for over a year and spent nearly every weekend on his back porch with a beer in hand.
Even if it was true, even if Doug and Jaimie had betrayed him, Ryan had no clean ground to stand on. He had done the same thing, on the same night, with Doug's own sister. He had no right to be the judge. And if Maddie was Doug's daughter by blood, it changed nothing about the love he felt for her. He had held her in the delivery room. His name was on her birth certificate. As far as Ryan was concerned, that was the end of it, and nothing Henry said could change it.