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“Let’s skip that pointless question because I already answered that. You’re stalling either for dramatic effect or out of shame. Just rip the band-aid off,” Myla advised; her patience was wearing thin.

“Ok.” Terry exhaled. He was stalling, but not for dramatics; he was stalling because he was experiencing shortness of breath from the disease that was killing him. “Five years ago, I was on the normal apps for downlow men: Jack’d, Grindr, Adam & Adam, looking for hookups. When I matched with…I matched with Myron.”

Myla gasped. Something she had never done before. She assumed a gasp was just a word that an author used for dramatic effect because she had never known anyone to do it. It felt like her heart had stopped. If she hadn’t known any better, she would’ve sworn that she had just experienced a massive heart attack. Of all names, she never expected to hear her father’s.

“You are a liar. You’re lying!” Myla screamed. She could not believe the things she was hearing.

“I’m not lying, Myla. I met Myron five years before I met you. We met on an app and found out that we were both members of FetLife. He fed my lust cravings, but that’s all he did for me. When I met you, I didn’t know Myron was your father. His dating profile said he was a widow and never had any kids. He told me that he was diagnosed with testicular cancer as a teen and the radiation left him sterile. You always told me your father’s name was Jasper.”

Myla felt like she was on the verge of dying. The information that Terry had just given her was not something she had ever told him. She had never even told Miranda about her father’s diagnosis from his teenage years. There was no need to ever bring it up. Yes, her father did have testicular cancer, but he wasn’t sterile. As far as the name was concerned, he was right. She had never told him or anyone else that her father’s first name was Myron because he never used it. He hated the name because Myron was also his father’s first name. Because of this, he went by M. Jasper Pleasant. Tears filled her eyes because she knew he was telling the truth.

“The day you brought me over and introduced us, you introduced him as Dr. M. Jasper Pleasant. That’s why I couldn’t look at him. He lied to me and lied to you. I didn’t know about you or your mom. After dinner, I broke things off with him.

“But when you and I got engaged, he lost it. He kept calling and texting, and I ignored him. Then you went out of town for the conference, and he showed up at the house unannounced, saying he just wanted to talk. You came home early and dropped your luggage. It was him that said, ‘God no!’”

“What?” Myla’s voice cracked as she asked the question that she didn’t need an answer to. She was devastated. She remembered hearing the screaming and the man running out the door into the biting cold, but she had tunnel vision and focused on Terry, who was the star of the show.

“Myla, I know this is a lot to digest, but I needed to tell the truth; I also wanted to apologize for leaving him exposed when he was dying. He said to call 911, but I was just scared, and I ran out.”

Myla ended the call. The pain that ripped through her core was butchering. Terry had known too many facts for it to be a lie. When her father died, she and Terry had been broken up exactly one year. She hadn’t spoken with him at all at that time.

There was no way for him to know the particulars of his death. Especially since none of the details about how her father was found were in the news, the only way he would’ve known the state her father had been left in was to have been there to see him.

A text message came through from Terry’s number that she wanted to ignore but couldn’t.

TEXT FROM 555-6969 – I know this is hard to accept, but I’m not lying. I just emailed you a zip file that contains everything. Every email, text, picture. Every Zelle, PayPal, Cash App.

“Oh, my God!” Heavy tears made it hard for Myla to see.

The lump of sorrow lodged in her throat threatened to suffocate her. The messages, the pictures, the poses…My God the poses. Positions that no child should ever see her father in threatened to send her into psychosis. This was too much for her brain to handle.

No act of betrayal had ever cut as deep as this. For her entire life she had been a daddy’s girl. To know that her father had been the one stabbing her in the back was a truth she didn’t know how to cope with. Her head felt dizzy, and her ears rang. Correction, it wasn’t her ears; it was her phone.

Rage filled her because she knew it was Terry. In the past, anytime he said or did anything offensive, he’d call repeatedly to apologize. No apology could ever fix what he had done.

Gripping the phone, she screamed into the receiver, “You downlow piece of shit. You ruined my fucking life. I hate—”

“Whoa, Myla! This is Dante. What’s going on? Are you ok?”

“Dante?”

“Yeah, it’s me. Are you ok? Why did you answer the phone like that?”

Myla couldn’t speak. This knowledge she had just gained was too heavy for her to share with a stranger. She needed to talk, but she refused to share how her life had been reduced to a sleazy tabloid story. If Jerry Springer were alive, he’d be proud.

“Myla, please talk to me. Last night you said that it felt like New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are cursed. Tell me why you feel like that. What’s going on?”

The tenderness of his voice instantly calmed her. Myla opened her mouth to speak, but ugly guttural cries escaped. Everything that she wanted to keep in came out. For twenty minutes, Myla shared everything that Terry told her. Dante listened without interruption, giving her the time she needed to get out her grievances.

“I’m so sorry, Dante. I know you’re probably just calling to get your jacket, and you ended up getting drama. You would think that with me being a board-certified psychologist, I’d be trained for this. But nothing prepared me for this. My dad preached about always being there for family. He portrayed himself as my rock, and the entire time he was a snake.

“The day my dad died, the last thing he said to me was, anything that was set to do you harm, known or unknown, God removed it. Maybe that’s why God removed him. He was the person doing me harm. This is crazy. I need to stop rambling. I understand if I scared you off.”

“I don’t scare easily, and why are you apologizing? The mess had to leave so the goodness could run in. Literally.” Both Dante and Myla laughed at that.

“No one’s life is perfect. God placed me in your life at this time for a reason. No drama, no judgment, just a new friend that’s here for you. What do you plan to do with this new information?”

“I need to call my mom to tell her this.”