Page 147

The pause that came next was the longest one yet. Nicole pressed the phone so hard to her ear it hurt and waited.

“It means Gina wasn’t the first,” her mother said.

Nicole stood up. She didn’t know why. She just couldn’t be sitting down for this. “How many?”

“Nicole.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know, baby. I stopped counting a long time ago.” Her mother’s voice finally wavered, just once, on the last word, and then it steadied again. “There were women. On the road, mostly. Some of them for a night, and some of them for longer than that. I found out about the first one when Tiffany was in kindergarten.”

Nicole hadn’t even been born yet.

She walked to the window. The backyard was green again, the trees at the edge of the lot full of new leaves. Twenty-seven years of marriage and a love letter on every anniversary, and her mother had known for almost all of it. And she’d bragged to Drew about them. She’d lain in her bed that first night on the phone with him and told him there’d never been another woman. Twenty-seven years, Drew. She’d said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Why did you stay?”

“Because I loved him.” Her mother didn’t have to think about it. “And because I had three babies, and I wanted them to have their father. And after a while, I think I just got very good at not seeing it. I told myself it was the road. That it didn’t come home. That what we had in that house was real, and the rest of it wasn’t.” She breathed. “And then he sat down at my kitchen table and told me some woman said she was carrying his child, and I couldn’t not see it anymore.”

Nicole pressed her forehead to the window glass. It was cool.

All fall, she’d been quietly mad at her mother for putting him out the same day he told her about Gina, for calling the lawyers before the test ever came back, for being so sure. She’d thought her mother was rushing it, and she’d thought it was unfair, and she’d kept talking to her father every week when nobody else in her family would, and she’d been so proud of herself for not picking a side.

She’d picked a side. She’d picked the wrong one.

“Did Tiffany know?” she asked.

Her mother didn’t answer.

“Mama. Did Tiffany know? All this time?”

“Not at first. She was too little.” Her mother stopped. “But she figured it out on her own, a whole lot sooner than I wanted her to.”

“And MJ?”

Another pause. “MJ found out a few years ago.”

So that was why. Nicole had spent all fall thinking Tiffany and MJ were being hard on him, that they’d decided he was guilty before anybody had any proof. They hadn’t needed proof. They’d known exactly who their dad was, and they’d been waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

And Nicole. They’d been waiting for her.

“So everybody knew,” she said. “Everybody but me.”

“Baby, we were trying to protect you.”

“From what?”

“From this. From exactly what you’re feeling right now.” Her mother’s voice cracked all the way open this time, and she didn’t try to hide it. “You were always his. From the day you were born, you were your daddy’s girl. You followed that man around the house from the time you could walk, and he couldn’t stand to be in a room without you, and I couldn’t . . . I didn’t want to be the one to take that away from you. None of us did. We thought maybe you’d never have to know.”

Nicole sank down the wall under the window until she was sitting on the drop cloth with her knees up.

“I yelled at Tiffany,” she said. “When the tabloid came out. She told me to pick a side, and I yelled at her. I told her he was her father too.”

“I know.”

“She must think I’m so stupid.” The last word came out wrong, and then she was crying, really crying, with the phone mashed against her ear and her other arm wrapped around her knees.

“Nobody thinks you’re stupid, Nicole. Nobody.” Her mother let out a long breath. “You loved him. That’s all you did.”