“Now what?”
I didn’t answer him as I brushed over the old faded photo.
“Rawling?” Phelan removed the photo from my hand.
He held it up to the light and then aligned the photo with my head. “Is this you? The baby in the photo?”
“Yeah.” Rawlins had a similar one of just me on his dresser.
“So it’s you with Rawlins’s sister and her husband. Nice.”
Something inside me stirred. That yellow door in the original pic had been familiar, but I’d dismissed it. But I’d obviously visited the house because I was there in the photo.
“They’re looking at you adoringly. Do you remember anything about them?”
“No.” I tried, but the yellow door was all I could conjure up.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were your folks.”
My last name wasn’t Dempsey or Guthrie, and I had a few photos of my parents, though none with me had survived.
Phelan
Rawling had fallen asleep after completing his history essay, but I was wide awake. Everything my mate had said about his godfather suggested he was a compassionate man, and yet he’d never spoken to Rawling about his sister.
I climbed out of bed and tiptoed into the other room.
“Father,” I said into the phone when he answered.
“Is everything all right with our son-in-law and our grandchild?”
I chuckled. “Yes, and your son is well too.”
“Sorry, but a phone call at this time of night is often bad news.”
I asked him if he’d known Charlie Dempsey at Sombertooth.
“Oh, yes. She was lovely, very bubbly, smart academically, and a gifted soccer player.”
“Did she mate someone from school?”
He said no, but while everyone at school liked her, Alphonse Shaw thought she was his mate. But after she finished her degree and left Sombertooth, he heard she’d mated a human.
“And where is she now? Because she still sponsors a soccer scholarship.”
“I heard they’d moved overseas.”
I puzzled over that detail. This was the twenty-first century, with emails and apps. Rawling’s folks had died when he was very young, so he’d lived with his godfather for sixteen or seventeen years. Why was there no contact between Rawlins and his sister?
I rifled through the photos and found the one of baby Rawling with Charlie and Arnie. I was beginning to think they weren’t someone my mate had visited once or twice before they left the country. Their faces as they held my mate were full of love.
I had two choices: not mention this to my mate or voice my idea and possibly shatter his sense of self by questioning who he really was? He'd already convinced himself he was a hunter.
But if I was right, this wasn’t my secret to keep, though Rawlins had taken it to his grave.
Rawling was already up when I woke up the next morning, and I found him tapping at the computer in the living area.
“Astronomy.” He didn’t look up as I kissed him.
