“I don’t know.”
But he said it too quickly.
“Dad.”
He turned.
The grief in his face startled me.
“Your mother begged me not to pursue charges,” he said quietly. “Paul was her last living family besides you. She believed he would come back and make it right.”
“Did he?”
“No.”
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t know.”
Again, not quite a lie. Not quite the truth.
“Rebecca said this may be more complicated than a bad marriage.”
“It may be.”
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
“I hoped I would never have to.”
“That’s not an answer.”
His shoulders lowered.
“No. I wasn’t.”
The honesty hurt, but I preferred it.
I sat down because my legs suddenly felt tired.
“All this time, I thought I was hiding who I was from Elias to protect myself. But maybe Cynthia already knew.”
My father did not deny it.
“How?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
“But you suspect.”
He looked at the portrait of my mother above the mantel. “I suspect Paul told someone things he should not have known.”
“Is Paul alive?”
My father did not answer.
“Dad.”
“I don’t know,” he said, and this time the uncertainty sounded real. “But six months ago, someone sent me an envelope with no return address.”
My heart began to pound.
“What was in it?”
“A photograph.”
“Of what?”
He opened the top drawer of his desk and removed a small locked box. From inside, he took an envelope, worn at the corners as if handled too many times.
He gave it to me.
My fingers trembled as I pulled out the photograph.
It showed my mother.
Not from years ago. Not from before she died.
The picture was dated eight months earlier.
It was impossible, of course. My mother had been gone five years. I had watched her illness take her piece by piece. I had stood at her funeral holding my father’s hand while rain soaked the cemetery grass.
