In a heartbeat, I’m furious about silence and evasion and secrets, about all that went on that I knew nothing of, all that might have helped me growing up under Tom Aldiss’s critical eye. Angrily, I say, “You watched me all those years, thinking I was your daughter? Did you not know how miserable I was—how I felt there was something wrong with me that my father treated me the way he did?”
“I knew,” he admits in defeat and, sensing my upset, pushes up from the wall. I’m not sure if he wants to protect me, belatedly, with his height—or use it to protect himself.
“And you did nothing?” I ask.
“What would you have had me do?”
“Tellme,” I say, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
Paul is suddenly as intense as I am. “And put a wedge between you and your sisters? And risk you resenting your mother—or blurting the truth to Tom at some point, which might have caused him to treat you worse or even disown you?”
“Or break up the law firm?” I add, because I’m not ready to see him as an icon of altruism. There were selfish reasons for what he—whattheydid. “Didn’t you feel like a fraud?”
“Every blessed day,” he says with vehemence. “But what would you havehad me do,Mallory?What?”
I don’t know. Still, my anger remains. I am angry at the situation, at all those lost years, maybe even at the awkwardness I feel now, which I never before felt with Paul. I can’t process the fact that he is my biological father—am so not in control of my feelings that I resent him for that, too.
“What if you aren’t?” I ask. I know I sound spiteful, even infantile, but that’s what anger does. When he looks confused, I say, “What if you aren’t my father after all? What if Tom was the only one with my mother during the time she conceived?”
“They were going through a rough patch for months before and after. They didn’t have sex.”
“She said.”
“I’ll happily take a DNA test.”
I think of that scrap of gauze. It would tell me if Tom and I match but, if not, it wouldn’t tell me who does. “What if shewaswith someone other than you?”
“DNA test,” he repeats.
“Why did she never tell me?” I ask. “She divorced Dad. She could have told me then. Did you ask her not to?”
“Absolutely not. I wanted her to tell you. I begged her—” He stops short.
“Then whydidn’tshe?” I cry with a resurgence of the emotions I had felt so often since my mother’s death. She didn’t know she would die so young. But I was a grown-up. I had a baby of my own. I deserved to know the truth. “Didn’t she trust me?”
“It was Tom she didn’t trust,” Paul says. “She didn’t know what he would do if word got back to him.” He pauses, pained. “How can I say things like this today?”
“How can you not?” I fire back. “He’s gone.She’sgone. We are not.”
He considers that. “True. And you’re right to be upset with Eleanor, but you have to understand. She worried he would destroy me, or destroy you. Tom could be vindictive. There was this lawyer—”
“Newcombe,” I say, remembering the name well. I remember my father’s vitriolic comments at dinner, when he got so caught up in ranting to Mom that he forgot we girls were there. “He accused Tom of accepting a bribe in exchange for giving a defendant a light sentence.”
“Tom got him disbarred.”
“Rightly so?” I ask. I can’t say that I always wondered. My father’s venom was so lethal that I had to believe his version.
Paul releases a small breath. “I can’t say.”
“Won’t say.”
He fixes me with a look of gentle chiding. “It’s not my place, Mallory. Tom isn’t here to defend himself. I just ask that you understand why your mother did what she did.”
Or didn’t do what she didn’t do, I think and suddenly picture Chrissie’s guilty face. These were all sins of omission. And Paul? I’m not yet ready to rationalize his fault.
“How do I know you don’t just want this to be true? You never had kids of your own, so maybe you want to think I’m it?” Before he can sayDNA testagain, I rush on. I’m being irrational. But the wholesituationfeels irrational. “How do I know you aren’t just the last man standing?”
His words are low but firm. “Because I know things another person wouldn’t know. I saw things another person wouldn’t see.”
