“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.
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?”
