I reared my head back and peered into his eyes, now only barely visible in the pitch dark. Luckily, we could see the house and its gleaming gold windows. “I feel so much better. A million times better.”
“Good. I'm glad. You know you can tell me anything, darling. You can't make me fall out of love with you because of something that happened in the past. It's all just part of you and I love you. You can't scare me.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“Good. Because there's one more thing I didn't tell you.”
“We'll freeze to death out here if it's another story like the one you just told me.”
I took his hand again and resumed our hike, with me leading the way. I still knew every subtle turn in this path. It was carved into my memory, just like the thing I was about to say. “It's not an actual story. It's the one detail I didn't tell you.”
We stopped when we cleared the woods and stood at the back of my dad's property. The warm glow from the house was brighter now. Eamon was so unbelievably handsome in the light. “Why did you leave something out?”
“Because it's something Amy doesn't know, something my dad doesn't know, either.”
“Can you tell me?”
I looked to the house again. I could see my dad in the kitchen with Fiona. My heart ached for the words that were about to come out of my mouth, but I knew I had to let them out. Then we could go back inside and be a family again. “The man my mom had an affair with? I'm pretty sure he's Amy's real dad.”
Chapter Nineteen
Despite the canonof terrible memories contained in my childhood home, it felt so good to step across the threshold after being in the woods with Eamon for so long. Waves of laughter filtered out onto the porch. Dad, Julia, Amy, Luke, and Fiona were playing charades in the living room in front of a roaring fire. This was what coming home had once felt like, a lifetime ago.
Amy sprang up from the sofa when she spotted us. “We were about to send out a search party. Everything okay?” She grimaced when she saw my current state up close. I didn’t need to look in a mirror to know that I looked like hell.
“Everything's good. I just need to go upstairs and change. I fell and banged up my knee.”
“Oh, shit,” Amy said. “The First Aid kit should be in Dad's room. I'll get it.”
She scampered off and Eamon helped me with my coat, then let me lean on him as I hobbled inside. We waited for Amy at the bottom of the stairs and resumed our previous conversation, without words, just disbelieving looks from him and my agreement.
Holy shit.
I know.
If it hadn’t been so cold outside, we could have stayed out there for hours debating the bomb I’d dropped about Amy.
She emerged from Dad’s room. “Do you need help?”
“I think I can handle it.” Eamon took the kit from her and tucked it under his arm.
“Come down when you're done,” Amy said, bubbly as a can of shaken soda. “Fiona is hilarious at charades. You should've seen her act outGone with the Wind. I nearly died laughing.”
A smile crossed Eamon's face. “We will. We won’t be long.” A step at a time, he helped me up the stairs and into my bedroom. “We need to get you out of those pants.”
“I’m usually way more excited to hear you say that.” I peeled off my jeans, wincing when the ragged edges of the torn fabric stuck to my knee. I settled on the edge of the bed and grabbed a throw blanket to drape across my still-frozen thighs.
“You can't tell her. You know that, right?” Eamon carefully dabbed at my skin with antiseptic on a gauze pad.
I let loose a heavy sigh. “I know I can’t tell her. I don't even know if it's true. My mom was so furious that morning and I was so scared. I’m not even sure I remember it right.” Except that there was something in my gut telling me that I had perfect recall of that day. My brain could screw up plenty, but not this. “She was throwing our clothes into suitcases and telling me that all three of us were going to live with him. I was panicked. It was the last thing I saw coming. I tried to argue my way out of it by saying that we couldn’t live with him because her boyfriend wasn't part of our family. She snapped at me and said she was pretty sure he was part of Amy’s.”
“My God, Katherine. She made a holy show of herself that day, didn’t she?” He shook his head in dismay and squeezed some antibiotic cream onto my knee. “I think she was just angry. No good comes out of saying anything after all this time. You were right to keep the secret.”
Funny how he could so simply answer a question I’d asked myself for more than twenty years. “You think so?”
“I would’ve done the same thing.”
