“Then what? Dad, it doesn’t make any sense.”
He held his hand lightly over his mouth as if it could catch the words he was about to speak.
“You were already there. Someone else had dropped you off.”
His words slammed into me like a tornado of bricks. I felt momentarily off-kilter, like a giant was swinging around the earth and I was staggering to get my bearings.
“But why would another person drop me off first?” I asked, desperately trying to cling to the reality I had known before. There had to be a simple explanation.
“Because your mum died. Of ovarian cancer, similar to Josh and June’s. But you—” he hesitated, “—you didn’t have a father listed on your birth certificate. Or any other family that could be located at that time.”
Ice spread through my chest.
I shook my head and staggered back to my chair.
Was he saying I hadanotherfamily?
“But you’re my father. It says so on my birth certificate,” I said, barely recognising the hollow sound of my voice.
“I’ll always be your father,” he replied, his voice thick with emotion. “But that’s not your original birth certificate. I’ve got it somewhere…”
His voice trailed off as he tried to read my face. He stepped forward and reached out, trying to cradle my shaking hand in his. I snatched it away, and my nose wrinkled with disgust.
“Then who are you? Who was Josh? Who is June?”
The man who I’d believed was my father until five seconds ago sagged under the weight of decades of pain.
“We’re the people who adopted you,” he said. “We’re your family. I couldn’t leave you there, not once I knew. You and June had become so… attached.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “No. No, June would’ve told me.”
She would have. If not as an adult, she’d have used it to torment me as a child. He had to be lying.
“Everyone was so young. You and June—five and six. You’d both been through so much. It was a murky year, and everything seemed to blend. It felt like you’d always been part of our family. Your memories before being in the home were inaccessible to you, and so I didn’t pry. As June’s memories of her mum faded and you and her were so close, you used to play an imaginary game where you had the same mother who’d died. Eventually, I guess you thought you did, and I didn’t correct it. I realised somewhere along the line that wires were crossed, but it seemed like a better outcome. You didn’t have to feel any different.”
“Except that Ialways did feeldifferent!” I shouted as disbelief filled me. “What about Josh?”
Dad’s eyes dropped to the ground. “I made him promise not to tell either of you. That was… a mistake.”
My eyes burned, and I stood, my entire world teetering as I sucked air through my teeth.
“Youkilled him!”I yelled.
Dad looked up, startled. His eyes darted sideways, no doubt calculating which neighbours might overhear.
I didn’t care. Not one bit.
I wiped my nose with the back of my hand and grabbed my bag to leave.
“Please, Riley. Sit down. Let me explain.”
I stared him down, erasing every trace of softness that had ever existed between us.
“You don’t need to explain. I’m not your daughter. June isn’t my sister. Josh wasn’t my brother. At least I won’t have to carry any grief about his death anymore, he was nothing to me.”
The words came out like missiles. They weren't true. Josh’s death still sat like a sorrowful longing on a little shelf in my chest. But why should it? He was nothing but a forced brother. Keeping my secret for Dad probably ate him up inside, the way that I could tell that it was eating Dad up now to bring it out in the open. That’s the problem with snaring things in boxes in your mind; the contents are ugly when they escape. Josh likely resented me every bit as much as I resented Dad right now.
“Goodbye,Colin,”I said and stayed a moment to watch his name hit him like a slap in the face before I turned on my heel and stormed out.
