“Your daughter isn’t here right now,” Malcolm says in a low, calm voice. “But maybe we can help find her for you.”
“Did you take her?” He surges to his feet, and there’s the sound of shattering glass as the photo falls to the floor. “Where’s my little girl?”
“No one took her,” I say. “She left.” I reach for his hand, bending low to grab the photo in the same movement. “She was accused of killing Derek Abbott.”
“She never killed anyone.”
My heart leaps as his gaze, seemingly clear for the first time, settles on mine.
“How do you know that?” I straighten up.
“She’s just a little girl, my Tiffany.” He pulls his hand free from my suddenly limp grip and takes the photo back. He knocks the remaining glass shards free with a knuckle and smiles at the picture. “Her mama was young too. Too young to look after Tiffany, so she brought her to me. What was I supposed to know about raising a little girl?” He shakes his head. “But she was so smart, and she didn’t need anyone to raise her. Raised herself really.” His smile slips. “I should have been better. I should have understood.” Using his stubby fingers, he pries one corner of the picture free, then lifts the whole thing out. “I’d do it differently now. I wouldn’t get so mad. Wouldn’t yell at her and that boy.” He angles the frame toward me and the dark, blurry image he’s just revealed.
I don’t understand what I’m seeing at first, the white hazy image and the matte-black background. Then I register the words printed in the corner.
It’s a sonogram dated the week Derek died.
“She was pregnant.” I whisper the words—not to anyone in particular, but Malcolm is suddenly right at my shoulder and staring, unblinking, at the image. “Was that in any of the news stories?” I ask him.
He shakes his head without looking away from the tiny little shape of the baby my mom carried before me.
But, no, that can’t be right.
“Who was the father?” Malcolm asks my grandfather.
“My daughter isn’t a whore,” is the angry answer he’s given. “Derek Abbott was the father.”
Malcolm lifts his eyes to mine. “How old did you say youare?”
I feel like I’ve been plunged into ice water. “I’ll be seventeen tomorrow.”
Malcolm extends the sonogram to me. “Are you sure about that?”
“They’re getting married,” my grandfather says, oblivious to the earth-shattering implication Malcolm just made. “He told me himself when I found out about the baby. Gave her a ring and everything. Ugliest, flashiest thing I ever saw, but Tiffany wouldn’t take it off, even though the thing must have weighed a good pound.”
My hand is clutching the ring I’ve worn on a chain around my neck for as long as I can remember. Mom told me all about how my dad proposed after finding it at a flea market and how she never wore it because it was too gaudy. Looping my finger around the chain, I draw it out from beneath my shirt. In a weak, almost breathy voice I ask, “This ring?”
He lunges for me so fast that Malcolm has to dive betweenus.
“Thief!” he roars. “You stole my baby girl’s ring! Thief! Thief!”
We can’t get him to calm down, and even though his mind might be impaired, his strength hasn’t diminished. It’s clearly taking everything Malcolm has to hold him back.
Cold needles into my bones as I try to get him to understand that I’m his granddaughter—Tiffany’s daughter—and that she gave me this ring and told me it came from my father, who couldn’t have been Derek Abbott. Derek died a year before I was born. And I knew my father; I have memories of him. Faint ones, but I have them. Mom didn’t cry until he died, until that night I found her cradling this ring and lifting it off her neck to fasten around mine.
I’m not old enough. I’m turning seventeen. I’d have to be nearly eighteen if Derek was my father.
But staring at the face of the grandfather she’d told me was dead, the one who keeps calling her by the name she changed, it isn’t hard to imagine her adding one more lie to the list: If she changed her name, why not change my age too?
Was it only after I was born that she met the man I remember as my father, the man who was kind to me and let me call him Daddy because of whatever sob story my mom invented for him?
Vomit begins burning its way up from my stomach, thawing the cold and scalding my throat.
My grandfather is still yelling—screaming, really—and I’ve stopped saying anything.
I hear footsteps pounding down the hall, and a second later the door opens.
Two people in scrubs rush past me and, misinterpreting the scene, one of them, a large man, bodily wrestles Malcolm away from my grandfather, while the other one, a slender woman with dense freckles all over her face, rounds on me.
