“Hm.” There was no way to really ease into this. “Did you know Daddy had another daughter?”
Her hands froze mid-fold. She cleared her throat, catching herself and continued the motion.
When she finally looked at me, her expression didn’t shift the way I expected. No wide eyes, no denial—just this look like she knew this day would come eventually.
“When did you find out?” she asked, setting the pants down.
“Yesterday.”
“How?”
I scrunched up my face. “You serious right now? Why does it matter? You obviously knew. Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
Kenya let out a shaky breath and pressed a hand to her chest. “After your father left the Marines, he got a military contract that had him in Japan often,” she said. “You must’ve been about four or five at the time.”
“I remember.”
“He was gone longerthan usual on one trip. Maybe a month? Then a few months later, he gets a call from some woman saying she’s pregnant.”
“And you just went along with it?”
“You don’t know what I’ve gone through, Nairobi,” she said, voice shaking. “What it means to have nothing, come from nothing.
She looked away from me. “You ever wonder why you’ve never met my side of the family?”
I had, actually. Not when I was a kid, though. Back then I just accepted whatever version of normal my parents gave me. We moved so much that I assumed that distance was the reason. Then I got to middle school, and I remember listening to girls talk about their cousins, aunties, big holiday dinners with extended family. I’d go home to Sterling, Kenya, and me in whatever house on whatever base, eating dinner in near silence. I asked her about her family once, and she changed the subject so fast I never brought it up again.
“I come from addicts and abuse,” she continued. “Your father gave me stability. He always came home. He didn’t hit me, he never yelled. What would I have if I left? And he’d make damn sure to keep you from me.”
Her eyes went glassy. “Sterling was the kind of man who liked things just so. I barely had an education, maybe that’s why he picked me. I was easy to mold into the perfect Stepford wife. Because where was I gonna go?” She laughed bitterly and shook her head.
I wanted to be angry—wanted to call her weak for staying, for being complicit in his lies—but I couldn’t. My mother made the choices she did to survive.
“Her name’s Hana,” I said quietly. “She lives in Japan, but I think she’s in the States now. And it seems like she’s known about me.”
Kenya’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
I rubbed my temples. “It’s complicated. But your husband left behind a clusterfuck for me to clean up, and that’s all I’ll say.”
She pursed her lips, looking like she wanted to press for more but thought better of it. She knew pieces of my life—stories that Sterling had fed her about me being a private contractor—but never the full picture. And I wasn’t about to divulge shit about The Order or his involvement in it.
“Are you going to meet her?” she asked after a beat.
I might kill her. That’s what I wanted to say.
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. I reached for a shirt and started folding it. “I’m not sure how I feel about somebody popping up after our father’s dead and gone.”
Kenya resumed her folding. “Maybe she’s had to deal with Sterling’s shit same way we did. Who knows what their relationship was like.”
“Not you caping for her.”
She patted my leg. “It’s easy to make up your own story when you don’t have all the facts. But maybe you should give her a chance. You’ve been on your own for so long. It doesn’t have to stay that way.”
“I have friends.”
That made her raise an eyebrow. “Oh, well excuse me. Not like I’d know. You come and go like a thief in the night.”
I sighed. “I can try to be better.”
