I stared at him.
He knew her name. He knew her age. He said her name the way you say the name of somebody you love.
Somewhere out there was a little girl who called my boyfriend Daddy.
And I’d known absolutely nothing about her.
“How long?” I said.
Ethan frowned. “What?”
“How long have you known about her?”
He looked at my father.
“Don’t look at him!” I shouted. “I’m asking you!”
Ethan flinched.
“Three years,” he whispered.
I felt like someone had slapped me across the face.
Three years. Three years of birthdays and anniversaries and Christmas mornings. Three years of ugly sweaters and Sunday pancakes and Paolo at the restaurant. Three years of him telling me he loved me. Three years of please, not tonight.
I turned to my father.
“And you knew?”
Dad lowered his eyes. He looked at the kitchen floor.
“Yes, sweetheart,” he said. “I knew.”
I looked back and forth between them. And I suddenly understood that the two men I trusted most in the whole world had spent three years keeping the same secret from me. Together.
“Start explaining,” I said. “Now.”
Ethan pulled out a kitchen chair for me. I didn’t sit down. I stayed standing, gripping the back of it.
“Before I met you,” he said, “I dated a woman named Megan. Megan Foster. For about a year. We broke up seven and a half years ago. It wasn’t a big dramatic thing. We just wanted different stuff. She moved to Indianapolis for a job. I never heard from her again.”
“Until?”
“Until three years ago,” he said. “She called me. Out of nowhere. On a Tuesday afternoon. I was at work.”
He swallowed hard.
“She told me she had a daughter. My daughter. She’d been pregnant when we broke up, but she didn’t find out until after she’d moved. And she decided not to tell me. She said she didn’t want me to feel trapped. She wanted to do it by herself.”
“And you just believed her?” I said.
“Not right away. We did a DNA test. A real one, through a lab.” He looked down at his hands. “Lily was mine. Ninety-nine point nine percent.”
I gripped the chair harder.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wanted to,” Ethan said. “I swear, Claire. I wanted to tell you that same night. But Megan was sick. Really sick. She had ovarian cancer. Stage four. She found out a month before she called me.” His voice cracked. “That’s why she called. She wanted Lily to know her father. Before…”
He didn’t finish.
“So you told my father instead?” I said.
Ethan glanced at Dad.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Ethan said. “I was falling apart. Robert was the only person I could think of. He suggested waiting a little. Until things settled down.”
Dad stepped forward.
“I thought a few weeks wouldn’t hurt anyone,” he said quietly.
“Three years, Dad,” I said. “You waited three years!”
Neither of them answered.
“Where’s Megan now?” I asked.
Ethan’s face changed.
“She passed away,” he said. “Two years ago. In March.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
I remembered March two years ago. Ethan had been so quiet that month. Distant. He’d told me a friend from college had died. I’d brought him a casserole and held him while he cried, and he’d never told me the friend’s name.
“So you’ve been raising your daughter for two years,” I said slowly. “By yourself.”
He nodded.
“And somehow you managed to hide an entire child from me? For two years?”
“I never wanted to hurt you, Claire.”
“You could have trusted me,” I said. “Instead, you chose to lie.”
Ethan looked down at the floor.
“Where does Lily live?” I demanded.
“She’s with people I trust,” Ethan said.
“Who?”
He exchanged another look with Dad.
“She’s safe, Claire,” Ethan said. “I promise you. She’s happy.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Then I remembered all those Saturdays.
All the Saturdays Ethan disappeared. The emergency meetings at work on weekends. The weekends he spent “helping Robert with the gutters.” The dinners he canceled at the last minute. Something came up at the office. I’m so sorry, babe. I’ll make it up to you.
“All those times you said you were working late,” I said. “All those Saturdays. Were you with Lily?”
Ethan hesitated.
“Sometimes. Yes.”
“Sometimes? How often?”
“I see her several times a week,” he said. “And most weekends.”
I let out a bitter laugh. It didn’t sound like me.
“Unbelievable.”
Then another question hit me.
“Where does she go to school? Who takes care of her while you’re at work? Why doesn’t she live with you?”
“She’s in second grade,” Ethan said. “She’s happy there. She has friends. People close to me help take care of her.”
“What people?” I said. “Give me their names.”
“Claire, please…”
“No! You don’t get to keep hiding things from me!”
Dad stepped between us.
“He’s been doing his best, Claire,” Dad said.
I turned on him.
“How would you know what he’s been doing?”
“Ethan talks to me,” Dad said. “He asks me for advice.”
“Apparently he tells you everything,” I said, “except how to stop lying to your daughter!”
Dad flinched like I’d hit him.
I grabbed my bag off the floor. I grabbed the handle of my suitcase.
“Claire, where are you going?” Ethan asked.
“Anywhere but here.”
Neither of them tried to stop me.
At the front door, I turned around.
“I don’t believe either of you has told me the whole truth,” I said.
Then I left.
I drove toward my friend Sarah’s apartment across town.
I barely noticed the road. I drove through two yellow lights that were really red. I didn’t turn on the radio. I just drove, gripping the steering wheel, saying the name over and over in my head.
Lily. Seven years old.
Something about that name bothered me. It sat in my chest like a splinter.
Then, at a red light on Hennepin Avenue, I suddenly remembered.
There was a little girl named Lily who came to visit Dad.
She came a lot. He said she was the granddaughter of an old friend of his from the teachers’ union, a man named Walter who’d had a stroke. Walter’s daughter worked long hours as a nurse, Dad said, and he helped out with the little girl sometimes. After school. Some weekends.
I’d met her maybe eight or ten times over the past two years. She was a quiet, sweet little girl with dark curly hair and big brown eyes. She liked to draw horses. She called my father “Grandpa Bob.”
I thought it was so kind of him. A lonely old widower, helping his sick friend’s family. I’d told my sister how sweet it was.
She was about seven too.
Last Christmas, I’d bought her a doll.
Dad had mentioned that Lily had been asking for one, a specific one with red hair and a blue dress and a little stuffed dog. I’d driven to three different stores to find it.
Lily had been at Dad’s house that Christmas afternoon, before dinner, before Jenna’s engagement. Walter’s daughter was working a double shift at the hospital, Dad said.
Ethan had been there too.
My stomach tightened.
I remembered Lily struggling with the doll’s packaging. Those terrible plastic boxes with the little twist ties. And I remembered Ethan kneeling down beside her on the rug to help.
When her curly hair fell across her face, he’d gently tucked it behind her ear.
I’d smiled at the time. I’d thought, He’d make such a wonderful father someday.
