Page 86
To: Me
December 23rd, 2005 9:01 am
Subject: (no subject)
I’m so scared, but if I wait until my birthday to tell her, at least I’ll be an adult. If she kicks me out maybe Melia and Shorty will let me live with them. Let’s use winter break to figure out getting married? Call me after the wedding.
From: Isa and Taylor
To: Me
December 23rd, 2005 9:30 am
Subject: Did you accept my marriage proposal over EMAIL?!
Please change your mind about tonight? If you crash the reception, I promise we’ll only dance to the slow songs. Can’t wait to give you your bday present tomorrow.
From: Isa and Taylor
To: Me
December 23rd, 2005 5:30 pm
Subject: The only birthday present I want is you
Better not be anything else, Barnes. ;-P
Chapter Forty-Four
Mora, Minnesota
November 2017
Analise
At 6:30 a.m. Analise sat at the kitchen table, having pored through her and Taylor’s secret email account for the past two hours, after calling in sick to work. She hadn’t known she was capable of such passion. But weren’t all teenagers heedless and emotional when it came to first-love intoxication?
The only problem was, the emails didn’t stop after her accident. Taylor kept writing. And writing. It would take her days to get through his messages. Not because of the sheer amount, though that alone would explain it, but because she could hardly bear his torment. The most recent was sent at 3:00 a.m., twelve minutes before she called him. The subject line: Last Email. It was tempting to read that one first, but she’d promised to start at the beginning. And she understood why. With each one, her wrath toward Ulla rose another degree. How could Ulla justify that kind of deception not only to her—but Penelope? The shock that drained Taylor’s face when Analise told him he had a daughter would be forever branded in her mind. She tried salving his pain, teeming with apologies, for she’d gotten a blank slate and Penelope. He’d gotten a memory bank crammed with debilitating nightmares and childlessness.
“Ana? What are you doing home?” Dany’s voice was full of trepidation. He’d entered the kitchen dressed in cargo pants, a sweatshirt, and jacket, ready for early work. He’d promised to return before dark and take the girls shopping in the city. She looked at him and burst into a fresh batch of tears. He knelt at the chair and gathered her into his arms, compounding the impossible emotions. Dany wiped her face, kissed her, and alternated between soft-spoken Spanish and English, as if testing which language would give her the most calm.
When she felt able to form a sentence not chopped with hiccups, she told Dany everything, filling in the details Taylor had shared about the accident and their forced separation, and how she told Taylor that he had a daughter.
Was any of this making sense to Dany? Analise watched his face morph from sensitivity to confusion, to hurt, and now suspicion. He stood, ran a hand through his hair, wiped his lips, and made a tent with his hands over his face. His brown eyes, always jovial, were now possessive. And angry.
He dropped his hands to his hips. “You’re telling me some guy shows up out of the blue with this story and says he’s Penelope’s father—and you believe him?”
Analise searched for a more rational defense, but all she could say was, “Yes.”
“It doesn’t mean he’s safe! Your mom wanted you two apart because clearly he was—a jerk at best, abusive at worst.”
“He-he’s not! It wasn’t like that,” she said, flustered.
“I thought you didn’t have any memories of him, of getting pregnant.”
Our first kiss. “I have one memory. I know that now. But even if I had none, he has all the evidence. We were engaged.”
“At seventeen? That’s ridiculous! What are you trying to say, you’re gonna run off and marry this guy instead of me?”
