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They were in the McGarrett home living room. Steve sat on the sofa, Mary on his left and Catherine on his right, each holding one of his hands. Danny and Chin flanked the sofa. Kono and Adam Noshimuri sat closely next to each other in chairs pulled from the dining table, holding hands tensely. Joe White sat in one of the armchairs, elbows braced on his knees and mouth covered by his clasped hands. Doris McGarrett sat in the other armchair, across from Steve.
Wo Fat had been shot and killed just hours ago in the backyard. The scene had been processed for the night, leaving them to listen to what Doris had announced needed to be told. A serving tray with a teapot and several teacups full of steaming white tea sat in the middle of the coffee table, untouched except for one cup in Doris’ hands.
She pulled her eyes up from her teacup and looked at Steve. “I need to tell you all the entire story. You deserve to know, and I can’t keep lying.”
Joe looked at her, expression questioning. She nodded at him before returning her gaze to Steve.
“I can’t give very specific details, but I can tell enough to convey what is important.” She took a careful sip of her tea and composed herself.
“The CIA assigned me to Japan to infiltrate and gather information on the Yakuza. This was before I had ever met your father.” She looked at Mary and Steve. Mary fidgeted.
“I met Hiro Noshimuri. I began a covert relationship with him. It was stupid, beyond stupid. But I thought I had everything under control.” She glanced at Adam and quickly looked down at her teacup. “But I became pregnant on accident. I was young, hadn’t been pregnant before, and didn’t notice any of the usual signs at the beginning. By the time I figured it out, it was too late to safely terminate the pregnancy. Hiro refused the idea as well. So we decided to fake my death and wait out the pregnancy until I gave birth.”
Danny shifted and flickered his gaze between Steve and Doris. Steve’s jaw was clenched.
“While we waited, Hiro arranged for us a way to give the child away. Hiro refused to simply adopt him to strangers, so he proposed to a leader of one of the Chinese Triads that owed him a favor to take our son. The leader’s wife was having difficulty conceiving, but it wasn’t public knowledge. She also happened to be Eurasian, so we thought perhaps he could pass as their child without questions.
“Once that was taken care of, I came out of hiding. I created a story in which the Yakuza had been holding me hostage for several months, but that I managed to escape. The CIA bought it. I came home, left the CIA, and met your father.” She looked at Mary and Steve again.
“So that’s why you were so good at hiding for twenty years. You had a little test run at faking your own death first.” Steve said to her, anger seething in his voice.
Doris looked at him levelly, expression steely. “As you all know now, that child was Wo Fat. Several years after I left Japan, Hiro had a reason to put a hit out on Wo Fat’s adoptive parents, and they were both killed. Without my knowledge, Hiro pinned the killings on Shelburne, and it didn’t take long for Wo Fat to pick up on that information. It wasn’t long after that that I faked my death again and fled to Japan. I confronted Hiro and he promised me Yakuza protection as long as I didn’t interfere.”
Steve glared at her. “Interfere?”
Doris glared back. “I couldn’t kill his son.”
Mary’s hand trembled in Steve's.
“Yeah, well, he’s gone now, because of his son. So is the father of your other children. And yet you still didn’t take the shot when you had it,” Danny spat at her.
Everyone but Steve and Doris turned to look at Danny, stunned. Catherine reached up and grabbed Danny’s forearm, giving him a look of warning. Steve and Doris continued to glare at each other.
Doris tore her stare away from Steve and looked at Danny. “You of all people in this room should understand.”
Danny threw up a hand and laughed bitterly. “Yeah, I would understand that, protecting my monster of a child…”
“Joe.” Chin interjected curtly. “What was your role in all of this?”
Joe froze. Then he moved to sit up straight, still looking at a loss for words. Doris cut in before he could collect himself.
“He figured out my past after John and I had gotten married. Neither of us wanted to hurt John, so it was…our secret.” She looked warily between Joe and Steve. “Joe helped me fake my death here and has been keeping tabs on me these past twenty years.”
Joe licked his lips before he started to speak to Steve, hesitant. “She was trying to protect you, all of you. You, Mary, and your father.”
“And it was working, until John got too close,” Doris began again. “Then Wo Fat killed him. And somehow after that, he started putting all of the pieces together. That I was Shelburne. That his real father was Hiro. That Hiro was the one who had had his parents killed, not me.” She looked at Adam. “So then he killed Hiro.”
“Why did Hiro let him close for all those years?” Adam asked softly. Kono gripped his hand harder.
Doris looked down at her lap. “I don’t know. I can’t really say I ever understood how Hiro felt about him. But whatever it was, it was enough that he made sure that Wo Fat was always connected to him somehow.”
“Wo Fat turned on him.” Steve interjected, tone angry. “Why didn’t Wo Fat turn on you the first chance he got, when he first found you here? Why did he wait until tonight?” Steve pulled his hands away from Mary and Catherine and leaned forward. “Why, Doris?”
In the dim light of the room’s lamps, she for a rare moment looked her age, like every bit of her hard and strange life. “I can’t say, Steve. I guess he wasn’t ever too sure how to feel about me.”
Steve glanced over at Adam. He looked as haggard as Steve felt. Steve then looked down at the teacup closest to him on the coffee table, nodding his head slowly.
For the first sixteen years of his life, family had been the four-person unit he lived with here in this house. But then Doris had seemingly died, and that neat and tidy definition of family had been blown up as much as the car she had supposedly died in. For a brief moment, there were mainland relatives that housed him but didn’t know how to handle him, so he pushed them away. Then he joined the Naval Academy, and his Navy brothers became his surrogate family for years and years.
But then another member of his original family died. He was pulled away from everything and everyone he had grown to care for, to come back to a place he had thought he would never call home again. He had willingly agreed to head the governor’s taskforce, but there was no real joy in it; he had resigned his life then to becoming a dark, lonely one, driven by vengeance and devoid of anything else truly meaningful. But then his 5-0 ohana formed, an unexpected but warm embrace that none of his previous families had ever matched. For the first time in his life, he’d felt like he had a real family.
Then she came back into his life, all because he couldn’t learn when to let something go, like Joe had tried to warn him of. She was an unwelcome shock that ripped open wounds that had taken so long to heal. Pouring salt in the wounds, with her had come other family, unexpected family, family he never wanted and wished he had never known about.
All of those versions of family converged right there in that very room. Steve would have felt dizzy with it, except for how quiet and still everyone was.
Steve realized why the smell of the tea was familiar to him. It was the same tea Doris had made for herself when he was a child. The same tea she told him she had discovered in Japan and was her favorite.
He shot up, picked up a teacup, and threw it against a wall. He looked darkly at Doris, and then walked out of the house.