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“Wh-what?” The white tiles of the hospital floor seemed to buckle beneath her chair.
“Well, more than one, actually.”
“More than one?” This was too absurd to be true. And yet she knew as she looked at him that he wasn’t lying. “Wait a minute, Dad. Something’s wrong, here. Very wrong.” She tried not to glare at her father, who was still recuperating, but, damn it, she could barely make sense of his words. “You’re trying to tell me that I have a sister—no, make that two?”
When he nodded, she said, “But how?” Her mind was spinning in furious, complicated and very ugly circles. Everything she’d believed in, all that she’d trusted in her life, had been a lie—a dirty, dark and shameful lie. “Why?” she asked, trying to sound rational when her entire world was turned upside down. “This…this Brynnie is their mother?”
“She’s Katie’s mother,” John said slowly and scratched the side of his cheek. “My other daughter—”
“Does she have a name, too?” Bliss couldn’t hide the sarcasm in her words.
“Tiffany. She’s older than you by a few years. The result of an affair I had before I met your mom.”
“Oh, Dad,” Bliss whispered, the tears she’d been fighting beginning to slide from the corners of her eyes. How could she have been so wrong about this man she’d loved all her life? The man who’d taught her how to ride bareback and lasso a wayward calf and swim in a river where the current was strong and swift? “You—you didn’t marry her?”
“I was ridin’ rodeo at the time. It wouldn’t have worked. Matter of fact, she wasn’t interested. I offered, she said ‘No, thanks,’ told me that she was givin’ the baby up for adoption. Seems as if she lied about that, though. I found out a few years back.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“As I said, I didn’t know it, but she kept the girl. Tiffany’s almost thirty-two now, and…well, it’s time she and I met. Especially now that she’s moved back to Bittersweet. Living in the same town, it doesn’t make much sense not to acknowledge that we’re father and daughter.”
“Are you sure? Maybe she’s not interested in meeting you.” Bliss, who had always prided herself on her strength, felt suddenly weary. She was usually a woman who moved easily in business circles, handled herself well at sophisticated and elegant social events, could adjust her style so that she felt as at home in a Seattle high-rise overlooking Puget Sound as she was in a low-slung ranch house that hadn’t seen fresh paint in twenty years. But this—this complete alteration of what she’d grown up believing to be right and true—was more than she could deal with. Nothing in her life had been this mortifying, except maybe her faith in Mason Lafferty all those years ago.
“It’s not so bad,” her father insisted. But then, he had no choice but to believe his own words, did he? If what he was saying was the God’s honest truth, then he had to trust that the situation would someway, somehow, work out. His graying brows drew together as if he were confused by the puzzle that was his life.
“Not so bad?” she repeated. “Well, it’s damned unbelievable.” Bliss, raised as an only child, had not one but two half sisters—grown women she’d never heard of before, never had known existed.
Clearing his throat and squaring his shoulders beneath the thin cotton of his hospital gown, her father mustered up as much bravado as he could. “So now I’m gonna change things. Brynnie and I are gonna get married as soon as the docs tell me I can move back to Bittersweet.” He fingered the edge of his sheet. “I’d like you to come with me, Blissie. Meet Brynnie and your sisters.”
“Meet them?” Boy, her father had really lost it. “Dad, it’s not just that simple. I mean…do they want to meet me?”
“Brynnie does.”
“And the others?”
“Don’t know.”
Could she do it? Go back to Bittersweet, a town that held all kinds of bad memories? She felt a familiar ache in her heart—one she’d tried to bury for ten years—and that old, dark pain seared through her. She rubbed her thigh where she still sometimes felt a jab of pain from the accident so many years before. She could only hope that Mason was roasting in his own private hell. “I don’t think so, Dad,” she heard herself saying. “My life’s here, in Seattle.”
“What have you got other than an apartment and a job?”
“Oscar.” She hitched her chin up an inch.
“That mutt of a dog can move with you. You can sublet your apartment and work from Oregon, what with fax machines and computer links and all. I know you spent one summer working out of a cabin in the San Juan Islands and another in Victoria
. So don’t give me any guff about having to be near the office. I’ll have the phone company put in more telephone lines to the house for your modem and whatever else you need. The way I understand it—” he eyed her as if expecting her to mount a protest “—or at least what you’ve always led me to believe, is that you’re pretty much independent anyway.”
That much was true. She worked with two other architects restoring old buildings in Seattle, but she was between projects right now and had planned to take a vacation to Mexico or the Caribbean or somewhere in the sun. So why not Bittersweet? A dozen reasons why. Mason Lafferty was at the top of the list. If he still lived there. She hadn’t heard from him in a decade and had never asked her father about him, though she had, over the years, gleaned a little about his life from people who had run across him. Not that it mattered. He’d betrayed her. Pure and simple.
Like your father betrayed your mother.
Well, she, for one, wasn’t about to dwell on the mistakes of her past. Not now. Not ever.
As for the half sisters she’d never known existed, what would be the point of meeting them now? True, she’d been raised as an only child and had always wished for siblings—brothers or sisters—but now that she was faced with her father’s infidelity, she wasn’t sure she could accept her sisters. Oh, what was she thinking? Sisters? Half sisters? Two of them? What would she say to them? What could she say?
“This is way too sudden for me, Dad.”
“And I’m runnin’ out of time.” He scowled and clicked off the television. “Who knows when the Grim Reaper’s gonna knock on my door?”
