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“Thank God.” She sniffled against my shirt.
I pushed her away from me, so I could look into her face. “What has you so upset?”
She shook her head. “Joe, it’s just too terrible for words. I can’t even imagine…”
“Come on.” I led her back to the table. “Sit down. Take a drink of…whatever that is.”
“Scotch.”
“Since when do you drink scotch?”
“Since this whole fucking thing happened.” My sister took a big gulp.
I sighed. This had been particularly hard on Marj. After all, the rest of us had known about what happened to Talon for twenty-five years. We’d kept the truth from her, trying to shield our baby sister, until a month or so ago, when Talon decided it was time to tell her. I often wondered if we’d made a mistake. Because the horrible ordeal had happened to Talon, Ryan and I had always taken his lead in dealing with it. Looking at my baby sister right now, I wished she were still ignorant.
But she wasn’t. Reality had been thrust upon her, the way it had been thrust upon the rest of us decades ago. She didn’t deserve this, but neither did anyone else. Most of all Talon.
“Take another drink.”
She did.
“All right. Now look at me, and tell me what happened.”
She rubbed the back of her neck. “I went to the gym today.”
“So you went to the gym. That’s a good thing.”
“I’ve been meaning to get back into my aerobics. There’s a new step class over at the gym, and I wanted to try it. So I went over today, and I renewed my membership.”
“And?”
“I had missed the class I wanted to attend, so I decided to get on the elliptical for a while.”
“Okay.”
“I did forty-five minutes, worked up a good sweat…” She gulped in a breath.
“Relax, honey. I’m here.”
“So when I got off the elliptical, I went over to get a towel to wipe my face, and there was another guy standing there, his back to me. He had gray hair.”
“Okay.”
“He lifted his arm, and I saw…”
“What did you see?”
“A…” She choked. “A birthmark. Shaped like Texas, like what Talon described to us. Right on the underside of the arm. Just like he said.”
My blood ran cold. “Who was it, Marjorie?”
But I already knew.
“It was the mayor, Joe. The mayor. Bryce’s father.”
My heart thumped against my sternum. I had all the evidence I needed. I had been racking my brain to find a way to get Tom Simpson to tell me where his birthmark was without alerting Bryce, and my innocent baby sister had discovered it unintentionally.
Although I hated what this was doing to her, I was glad to know.
