The light turned green. The car behind me honked.
I pulled into the empty parking lot of a closed bank and put the car in park.
Stop it, I told myself. There were plenty of little girls named Lily. It was a popular name. And Dad had always been wonderful with children. He’d been a teacher for thirty-five years.
But then I remembered something else.
On Christmas morning, Dad had insisted we take a group photo beside the tree. He’d set up his camera on the tripod he only used at Christmas. He’d made everybody squeeze together.
Lily had stood next to Ethan.
And I remembered how Ethan had posed. With one hand resting protectively on her small shoulder.
I opened the photo gallery on my phone and scrolled back to last Christmas.
There they were.
In one picture, Lily was sitting beside Ethan on the couch, hugging her new red-haired doll. In another, Ethan was helping her put on a Santa hat. She was laughing, her head tipped back. She looked completely comfortable with him. Like he was the most natural person in the world for her to be leaning against.
I zoomed in on their faces.
The same brown eyes. The same dimple, on the left side only. The same way of scrunching up the nose when they laughed.
How had I never noticed?
How had I sat right there in my father’s living room and never once noticed?
Then another memory hit me.
At Christmas dinner, before Jenna’s engagement, Lily had been sitting at the little card table Dad set up for the kids. She’d turned around in her chair and looked at Ethan.
“Are you coming tomorrow?” she asked him.
Before Ethan could answer, Dad jumped in.
“Lily, sweetheart, would you like some more pie?”
I’d thought nothing of it. I’d thought it was just a kid asking a random question.
Now I wondered what else I’d missed. What else I’d smiled at and walked right past.
I found Dad’s number and pressed call.
He answered on the first ring.
“Claire? Honey, are you all right? Where are you?”
“Dad,” I said. “Remember that little girl? Lily? Who stayed with you at Christmas?”
There was a pause.
“Of course,” he said.
“What’s her last name?”
Silence.
Then he cleared his throat.
“Why are you asking, kiddo?”
I gripped my phone tighter.
“Just answer the question.”
“Claire,” Dad said. “I really think you should talk to Ethan.”
That was all I needed to hear.
“Never mind, Dad,” I said. “I’ll figure it out myself.”
I hung up before he could say anything else.
Then I started the car.
I was going to Dad’s house. And this time, I wasn’t calling ahead.
Twenty minutes later, I pulled into Dad’s driveway on Maple Street.
Ethan’s car was parked out front, his blue Honda with the dent in the passenger door from the time I backed into a pole.
I stared at it.
An hour earlier, he’d told me he’d give me time to think. Apparently he’d driven straight here the minute I left.
I walked up the front walk. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my teeth. The porch light was on. Through the front window, I could see the blue flicker of the TV and the warm yellow lamp in the living room.
Before I could ring the bell, I heard a little girl laughing inside.
I recognized that laugh.
Lily.
Then I heard her voice through the door.
“Daddy, can you help me with my homework? It’s subtraction. I hate subtraction.”
“Of course, sweetheart. Nobody likes subtraction. Let me see.”
I froze.
That was Ethan’s voice.
For several seconds, I couldn’t move. I just stood there on my father’s front porch, on the same welcome mat I’d wiped my feet on my whole life, listening to the man I’d lived with for six years help his daughter with her math homework.
Then I took my spare key out of my purse and unlocked the door.
Lily was sitting at the coffee table in the living room. She was surrounded by notebooks and colored pencils and a box of crayons with half the labels peeled off. She was wearing pink pajamas with horses on them.
Ethan was crouched beside her, holding a pencil.
Dad came out of the kitchen carrying a plate of chocolate chip cookies.
All three of them looked up.
“Claire?” Ethan whispered.
I barely heard him. I was staring at the little girl.
“Lily?” I said.
She beamed at me. A huge smile, with a gap where her front tooth used to be.
“Hi, Claire!”
I took a few steps into the living room.
The red-haired doll I’d given her for Christmas was sitting on the couch, propped up against a cushion. Somebody had brushed her hair. Somebody had made her a little blanket out of a dish towel.
I turned to Ethan.
“She’s your daughter?”
He opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
“Ethan,” I said. “Answer me.”
Finally, he nodded.
“Yes.”
I looked at Dad, standing there in the kitchen doorway with his plate of cookies.
The little girl he’d introduced as his sick friend’s granddaughter was living in his house. There was no Walter. There was no nurse working double shifts.
He hadn’t just known about Ethan’s daughter. He’d been helping raise her. Right under my nose. For two years.
“Lily, sweetheart,” I said. I forced my voice to stay calm. “Could you go upstairs for a few minutes? The grown-ups need to talk.”
She looked confused. She looked at Ethan. He nodded at her.
“Go on, bug,” he said. “We’ll come get you in a little bit.”
She got up and ran upstairs. I heard her bedroom door close.
Her bedroom door.
In my father’s house.
That was my old bedroom.
The moment the door closed, I turned on both of them.
“You let me meet her,” I said. My voice was shaking. “You let me buy her Christmas presents. You let me sit on that couch and watch her open them. And neither of you thought I deserved to know?”
Dad stepped forward. He put the plate of cookies down on the end table.
“Claire, please let me explain.”
“Then explain!”
He sighed. He looked a hundred years old.
“After Megan died,” he said, “Ethan was struggling. He had a full-time job. He had a little girl who’d just lost her mother and was moving to a whole new city where she didn’t know anybody. Megan’s parents are elderly. They live in a retirement community in Florida. They couldn’t take her. So I offered to help.”
“So Lily lives here?”
“Yes,” Dad said. “We thought it would be temporary. Just for a few months. Then there were legal things to sort out. Megan’s sister contested the custody for a while. That took over a year. And by then, Lily was settled here. She was happy. She had her school and her friends and her room. We didn’t want to uproot her again.”
“I take her to school every morning,” Ethan said. “I come here every night for dinner and homework. I’m here every weekend.”
I shook my head.
I remembered all those afternoons Dad had invited me over. Lily’s visiting today, why don’t you come by? She’d love to see you.
“You were watching me spend time with my boyfriend’s daughter,” I said, “while pretending she was a stranger.”
“I thought if you got to know her naturally…” Dad began.
“Naturally?” I said. “You lied to my face, Dad! Over and over! You made up a fake friend! You made up a whole fake family for her!”
“I was trying to help you two build a relationship,” Dad said. “Before the truth came out. So that when it did, you’d already love her.”
“By tricking me?”
Dad didn’t answer.
