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Nancy thumped the bag of flour onto the countertop. “He threw it away trying to impress women.”
“Women?”
Nancy seemed to deflate. It was like watching the air leave a balloon. “I was never going to tell you girls. I know you adored your father. He had some wonderful qualities.”
“Wait a minute—” Jenna didn’t dare look at Lauren. “You’re saying Dad had another woman?”
“Not one woman. One woman would never have been enough for your father. He blamed me, of course. Said that the fact that I earned the money ‘emasculated’ him and made him look foolish among his friends. Apparently his ability to pick up women somehow solved that, although I’ve never understood how multiple affairs made him more of a man.”
Jenna saw Lauren glance in her direction.
Knowing exactly what her sister was thinking, Jenna shook her head fractionally. Warning bells were clanging in her head and she wondered why her sister wasn’t hearing them, too.
Do not say what you’re thinking of saying.
“Why didn’t you leave him?”
Nancy gave a wistful smile. “Because of you girls. You, Jenna, in particular, used to wrap yourself around him the moment he came in from work.”
Jenna remembered it. Daddy, Daddy, Daddy...
“I couldn’t take that away from you,” Nancy said. “Anyone who saw the three of you together would have understood that. The three musketeers. That’s what he called you. Everyone remarked on what a good father he was. I couldn’t spoil that for you. And I didn’t want to tarnish those memories, but now I have and I’m sorry for it. I want you to forget it.”
Forget it?
“We knew,” Lauren said. “We knew he had another woman.”
Jenna wished she’d gagged her sister.
“That isn’t possible.” Nancy’s face drained of color. “I was so careful. I never talked about it when you were in the house.”
“You weren’t the reason we knew.”
Jenna didn’t know how to stop what was coming. “Lauren, don’t—” Was she really going to do this after all those years of keeping it to themselves? And now, when her mother was obviously feeling vulnerable? What if telling the truth made their mother feel worse? But then she saw Lauren’s jaw lift and knew that nothing she did or said was going to stop what happened next. She recognized that look.
It was a look she hadn’t seen on her sister’s face in a long time.
She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or nervous.
“We saw him, Mom.”
“You saw him with a woman?” Her mother’s face contorted. “He swore to me he never brought them to the house after that first time—”
Her mom had caught her dad with a woman in the house?
Jenna’s head was spinning.
“Not the house,” Lauren said. “It was at your studio. You were in Europe. We thought Dad was asleep and we sneaked out of the house. We did it all the time. And we saw him through the window.”
How could her sister be so calm?
Jenna was shivering as if she had a bad case of the flu.
She tried never to think about that day.
She’d pressed her nose to the glass, trying to work out what was happening. She’d seen her father’s naked, hairy limbs tangled with those of a woman. For a moment she’d thought they were wrestling, and couldn’t understand why her charming, easygoing father would be fighting. Was the woman an intruder? But why would her father be naked?
And then she’d seen something else that she’d never been able to completely wipe from her mind.
