PART 4: THE DAUGHTER HE HID

For a moment, neither Lily nor I spoke.
Then Lily took the report from Dad’s hands and scanned the page.
“Wait,” she said. “This says Emma and I aren’t related. Where are your results?”
Dad stared at the envelope. “There’s another page.”
He pulled it out.
I watched Lily read it. Her face drained of color.
“What does it say?” I asked.
She passed it to me.
According to the report, Dad was Lily’s biological father.
He wasn’t mine.
I looked at him. “You knew.”
“I knew what the test said,” he answered.

“And you let me spend twenty years believing you were ashamed of my face.”
“I was afraid you’d think I stopped loving you when I found out.”
A laugh escaped me, sharp and disbelieving. “You stopped taking me anywhere. You stopped mentioning me. What was I supposed to think?”
Dad flinched.
Lily stepped between us. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Daniel had been watching Emma. Your mother’s friend told me there might have been a mix-up at the hospital. I thought if I could keep him away long enough, I could find out what really happened.”
“So you got the test,” I said. “And then?”
Dad’s eyes filled. “Then I couldn’t bear to tell you. I was the only parent you had left.”

The front door opened wider. My husband, Ben, came out, followed by our ten-year-old daughter, Rose. She stopped when she saw us.
“Mom? Did something happen?”
I folded the report before she could read it. “Go inside with Dad, sweetheart. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Ben looked at me, then gently guided her back toward the birthday cake.
I waited until the door closed. “Who are my parents?”
Dad’s silence was answer enough to one question: he still had more to tell.
“I found the other family,” he said. “Their name was Bennett. They’d had a daughter the same night your mother gave birth.”
Lily leaned against the porch railing. “The girl who went home with them was supposed to be Emma?”
“That was what I believed.”
“And what happened to their daughter?” I asked.

Dad rubbed a hand over his face. “There was no other daughter living with them when I went looking.”
I stared at him.
“The Bennetts told me their baby died before they left the hospital. I didn’t know whether the records were wrong, whether Daniel had lied, or whether the test was wrong. I hired someone to find the original hospital files. By then, the nursery records had been archived, and some were missing.”
“Did you tell the Bennetts about me?”
“No.” His voice broke. “I was afraid they would take you.”
I looked down at the faded photograph in my hand. All those years, I had thought the space Dad kept around me meant he didn’t want me seen. Now I understood that he had been trying to keep someone else from seeing me.
It didn’t make the empty chair beside him at my graduation hurt any less.
“You should have told me when I was an adult,” I said.

“Yes,” he whispered. “I should have.”
Lily picked up Mom’s letter. “There’s more on the back.”
Dad lifted his head sharply. “What?”
She turned the page over. In the lower corner, beneath a fold, Mom had written two lines in tiny handwriting.
Daniel is lying about why he wants to find her.
Ask him what happened to the Bennett baby.
Dad went utterly still.
“You never saw this?” Lily asked.
“I read that letter a hundred times.” His voice was thin. “I never unfolded that corner.”
My phone buzzed inside the house. A moment later, Ben opened the door again.
“Emma, someone’s calling you over and over. The name on the screen is Daniel Mercer.”
Dad rose so quickly the box slipped from his knees.
I took the phone from Ben. The call ended before I could answer. A text appeared in its place.
Your father finally brought the box. Good. Ask him why the Bennetts were told their daughter died.
Before I could show anyone, a second message came through.
Then ask him whose grave you’ve been visiting with him every Mother’s Day…………………