Chương 4
“Opening one and submitting one are different things.”
Mara’s mind jumped unwillingly to Christmas morning.
Noah sitting cross-legged on the rug despite being thirty-five, laughing at the instruction booklet, saying he was absolutely not mailing his spit to strangers.
Elaine had laughed too.
Later, after dinner, Mara had seen her mother carrying the unopened kit toward the kitchen.
At the time it had meant nothing.
Now the memory returned with edges.
“You know Noah?”
“I know of him.”
“How?”
Thomas went silent.
Mara’s pulse climbed.
“How do you know about my brother?”
“I’ve already said too much over the phone.”
“No, you’ve said exactly enough to scare me and not enough to explain why.”
“That wasn’t my intention.”
“I don’t care what your intention was.”
“I understand.”
“Stop saying you understand me.”
“All right.”
She closed her eyes.
Daniel’s conference.
Her mother’s lie.
Richard arriving at five with oak boards for a bookshelf.
Every relationship in her life suddenly seemed to contain a locked room.
“Why shouldn’t I confront Dad alone?”
Thomas did not answer.
“Is he dangerous?”
“No.”
The certainty came instantly.
Mara’s shoulders loosened a fraction.
“Then what?”
“Because if Richard learns you know before Elaine tells you the truth, he’ll do what he’s always done.”
“What does that mean?”
“He’ll protect her.”
Mara almost laughed.
“That’s your warning?”
“You don’t understand what it has cost him.”
The sentence landed strangely.
Not what it would cost him.
What it had cost him.
“You know my father.”
“Yes.”
The word seemed to alter the temperature inside the car.
“How?”
Thomas breathed out.
“We knew each other a long time ago.”
“How long ago?”
“Before you were born.”
Mara stared at his profile photograph.
The sailboat.
The gray hair.
Her own mouth smiling from a stranger’s face.
“Were you friends?”
Thomas took too long to answer.
“Once.”
“And he doesn’t know you’re my biological father?”
Another pause.
Mara felt something inside her settle into dread.
“Thomas.”
“I didn’t say that.”
She stopped moving.
The elderly man returned from the pharmacy and glanced toward her car as he passed.
Mara barely saw him.
“My mother said Dad knows nothing.”
“I heard you.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.”
“Does Richard know who you are?”
“Yes.”
Her fingers went numb around the phone.
“Does he know I’m your daughter?”
Thomas said nothing.
Mara heard gulls again, sharp and distant.
“Does he?”
“Yes.”
The word entered her life quietly.
No crash followed it.
No physical thing changed.
The pharmacy doors kept opening.
Traffic moved along the street.
A woman in scrubs stood beside a trash can drinking coffee.
Mara looked down at Richard’s message about the oak boards.
Thirty-nine years.
Not one parent lying.
Both of them.
Her phone buzzed against her ear with an incoming call.
DAD.
Mara stared at the name.
Thomas must have heard the interruption.
“Who is it?”
She swallowed.
“My father.”
“Don’t answer until you’ve spoken to Elaine.”
Richard’s call ended.
Immediately a text appeared.
Change of plans.
Cardiologist canceled.
I’m heading to your place early.
Should be there in twenty minutes.
Mara’s stomach tightened.
Her house was twelve minutes away.
Daniel had texted while she was talking to Thomas.
Conference wrapped early.
Coming home.
We need to talk before tonight.
Mara looked from one message to the other.
Her father was driving toward her house.
Her husband was coming home from a trip he had already lied about.
Her mother was waiting for her at ten thirty, expecting Richard to be somewhere else.
And a stranger who shared half her DNA was breathing quietly into her ear.
“Mara,” Thomas said, “where is Richard going?”
She started the car.
“To my house.”
“Then don’t go there.”
Mara backed out too quickly, forcing another driver to brake.
The man slapped his horn.
She raised one hand in apology and pulled toward the exit.
“Why?”
Thomas said her name, but she was done accepting fear without information.
“If you know something about my father, tell me now.”
“I know something about all of you.”
The light at the parking lot exit turned red.
Mara stopped hard.
“What?”
Thomas’s next breath trembled faintly.
It was the first uncontrolled thing she had heard from him.
“The DNA test didn’t expose the secret your mother was afraid of.”
Mara stared at the red light.
Behind her, somebody honked.
“What secret was she afraid of?”
“I think that’s why she bought the tests.”
“Why?”
“To find out whether something Richard told her thirty-five years ago was true.”
The light changed.
Mara did not move.
The driver behind her leaned on the horn.
“What did he tell her?”
Thomas was silent for so long that Mara thought the call had dropped.
Then he said, “Ask Elaine what happened to the baby she brought home before you.”
Mara drove through the intersection with Thomas’s question lodged in her mind like a piece of glass.
“What baby?”
Thomas did not answer immediately.
“You need to hear that from Elaine.”
“You just told me my father has been lying to my mother for thirty-five years about a baby, and now you’re concerned about boundaries?”
“I’m concerned about getting it wrong.”
“Then tell me what you know, not what you think.”
A truck changed lanes in front of her, and Mara hit the brakes hard enough to throw her purse off the passenger seat.
She heard its contents scatter across the floor.
Thomas said, “Are you driving?”
“Yes.”
“Pull over.”
“Don’t start acting like my father.”
The words came out before she could stop them.
Thomas went quiet.
Mara hated that she cared whether they had hurt him.
She turned onto a residential street and parked beneath a maple tree already beginning to redden at the edges.
A sprinkler clicked steadily across somebody’s lawn.
“All right,” she said.
“I’m stopped.”
Thomas let out a breath.
“When Elaine and Richard got married, I was still in their lives.”
“Their lives?”
May you like
“We had known each other since college.”
“All three of you?”
