“I found the receipt in his papers,” Isla says.“Why, Mother?Why would he get a vasectomy?”
She waits.
The silence stretches long enough that Isla can picture her mother, standing in some elegant kitchen, phone pressed to her ear, mind racing through versions of the truth to decide which one might still work.
Finally—
“I had a very hard labor and delivery,” her mother says tightly.“Keir was with me the entire time, but watching me suffer… it got to him.I was in labor for nearly twenty-four hours.They should have given me a C-section, but the doctor justknewyou were about to deliver.”
Isla closes her eyes.
She’s heard parts of this story before.The long labor.The incompetent doctor.The suffering.That much has always been true.
“Don’t ever use a country doctor who should have retired years ago,” her mother adds bitterly.
It fits.Too well to dismiss.
“In true Keir fashion,” Alisa continues, “he reacted emotionally, without coming to talk to me.He did it without telling me.When he came home in pain, that was the first time I knew what he’d done.”
Isla swallows.
“I wanted more children,” her mother says, voice tight with old rage.“I wanted us to have a family.And yet he ended that possibility without discussing it with me.”
Isla can understand that anger.A decision like that should never be unilateral.
“That was probably the beginning of the end,” Alisa continues.“Then, when he went on tour the next time, he didn’t have to worry about getting anyone pregnant.And when I surprised him, when I brought you to visit him, I found him drunk, in bed with two of his groupies.That was the final straw.”
That part Isla has heard before.
It lands differently now, weighted by everything else.
“So,” her mother says crisply, “now that you know the truth, it’s time for you to come home.”
Isla stops pacing.
“No,” she says simply.“Not yet.The ninety days are not up.I’ll be home when I’m finished and feel satisfied I’ve learned the truth about my father.”
“Isla, your next concert is in sixty days.”
“I’m preparing,” Isla replies.“Every day I practice on his Steinway.It’s a very nice piano.”
The silence that follows is dense.Dangerous.
She can hear the anger seething through the phone lines.
“Is there anything else you want to tell me?”Isla asks calmly.“Before I discover it in his personal papers?”
She gives her mother an opening.
A chance.
“You know everything,” Alisa says sharply.“Your father was a cheater who I kicked out of our home.His music was more important than you or I ever were.”
Why does it feel like she’s holding something back?
Is it the anger?The urgency?Or the way she hasn’t once asked Isla how she’s doing, only when she’s leaving?
“Well,” Isla says, voice steady, “I’m going to continue digging in my spare time, trying to learn who my sperm donor actually was.When the ninety days are up, I’ll put the castle on the market and return home.In the meantime,” she adds, “I’ll be practicing for the concert.”
