From This Day On

“You never suspected?” he asked. “Your mother never said anything?”

“Like, by the way, your real father is this creep who raped me when I was only nineteen?”

“Uh...I was thinking more along the lines of saying that she was pregnant already when she met my dad, but he’s a good guy who took responsibility for you.”

Amy huffed out another laugh. “One of the things she wrote in that diary—” she nodded toward the book that still lay open to the final, devastating passage “—is that she didn’t ever want to think about what happened again. Then she said, and I quote, ‘But I can’t completely pretend, can I?’ And she was right, because she was stuck with me. A living, breathing manifestation of the worst thing that ever happened to her.”

Jakob visibly winced.

“Hard to put it all out of your mind once you realize you’re pregnant,” she continued, her tone hard. “Did you know Mom was raised Catholic? I think we can assume if she hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have seen the light of day.”

He sat forward abruptly. “Jesus, Amy, don’t talk like that.”

“I’ve had two days to think about it. Wouldn’t most women who had been raped want to abort the baby?” She saw that he couldn’t deny her conclusion. “But Mom was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Specifically, her religion and her parents. Your dad gave her an out.”

He closed his eyes and scrubbed a hand over his face. He looked older when he was done. “No wonder he was so angry.”

“No kidding.”

“I tried to call him last night. When I hadn’t heard from you. He hasn’t returned my call yet.”

“You were going to ask him if he knew what was in the time capsule?”

“Yeah.” Jakob grimaced. “I was going to ask him if you were his kid.”

“I suppose the panties raised a few questions in your mind.”

“You could say that.” His eyebrows drew together. “DNA testing wasn’t available that long ago, was it? Did she say what she was thinking?”

“Only that she never washed them because she couldn’t bear to touch them. She says in there that they and the diary were a sort of funeral offering. That the woman—girl—she’d been was dead.”

They were both quiet for a minute after that.

Jakob let out a long sigh. “You know what you have to do, don’t you, Amy?”

She gazed at him in alarm. “What do you mean?”

“You have to talk to your mother. We could be completely wrong about all of this. The pieces could fit together in a way you’re not seeing at all.”

“You know I’m not wrong.”

“That doesn’t mean you should sweep it all under the rug, even if that’s what she did. You won’t be able to come to terms with it until you hear her side of what happened, why she made the decisions she did.”

Amy crossed her arms protectively. “What makes you think she won’t keep lying to me?”

“Why would she? You’re not a child anymore. I imagine she kept the secret partly, or even mostly, for your sake. You’re in your thirties now, and it’s tough to take in. Imagine if you’d found all this out when you were sixteen.”

Amy shivered a little. Of course he was right, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still mad at her mother. Which wasn’t the worst part, she realized. Most painful was the fact that, as a woman, she understood and sympathized with her mother. A second shiver was more of a shudder as she thought about having to bear a child of rape, keep her, raise her, pretend to love her.

Could I?

She honestly didn’t know.

“I’ll call her once I’ve absorbed all this.”

Jakob shook his head, his expression implacable. “Nope. We’ll figure out the time difference and you’ll call her tonight, while I’m here.”

“What?” she snarled. “You think I’ll collapse if I don’t have you here to support me?”

He actually had the nerve to smile. “No, I think you won’t do it at all.”

“My privilege.”

“I want to know, too,” he said simply.

She should have asked why. What difference did it make to him? Did he want permission to go back to ignoring her?

But she couldn’t do it. Some veiled emotion in his eyes made her uneasy. Did he suspect some other truth? If so, she couldn’t deal with it.

Anyway, maybe he was right. She should demand answers now, while the tide of anger still carried her. Wimping out wasn’t her style. She wasn’t about to start now.

“Fine,” she snapped. “I’ll do it. But not because you say I have to.”

He chuckled, deepening the creases in his cheeks.

Amy wanted to punch him.

CHAPTER FOUR

JAKOB’S PHONE RANG only a minute after he and Amy had finished calculating the time difference with Sydney, Australia. He looked at the number then answered.

“Dad.”

Posture having gone rigid, Amy closed her laptop.

“Hope you were calling to tell me you talked your sister out of that time capsule nonsense,” his father boomed in the voice that served him well on job sites.

Jakob winced. “Hold on, Dad.” He pressed the phone to his belly and said quietly to Amy, “Do you want to talk to him? I can put this on speaker and tell him I’m with you.”

“Well, that would be cozy.” Snarky seemed to be her fallback mode, but he saw the anxiety in her eyes when she lifted her head. “Call me a coward, but I don’t think I’m ready to talk to him. I know I’ll have to eventually, but...not now.”

“All right. You can eavesdrop if you want,” he offered, even though he didn’t much like the idea of luring his dad into confidences he didn’t know were being overheard.

She shook her head and started past him. “I need to shower.”

“Amy.” He said her name softly, but she stopped, her back to him. “Ask me if you want to know what he says. I won’t keep secrets from you.”

She nodded jerkily and kept going.

Swearing under his breath, Jakob lifted the phone back to his ear. “Dad?”

“Who was that? Did I get you at a bad time?”

“No, this is fine. A woman. She’s, uh, going to take a shower.”

“Lady friend?” His father sounded pleased. “You haven’t mentioned one recently.”

Jakob didn’t say, That would be because there hasn’t been one in a while, even though it was the truth. He liked sex as well as the next guy, but with the big four-oh looming on the horizon, he’d begun to tire of the effort it took to get some. Dating was mostly a huge waste of time.

He also didn’t say, Nope, I’m with Amy. She’s upstairs stripping and getting in the shower right now. He didn’t even want to think about that, never mind say it aloud.

“No, it’s been a while.” Vague was good, he congratulated himself. “And no, I didn’t head Amy off. In fact, I went with her, spent the weekend in Frenchman Lake.”

Deafening silence.

He made his voice hard. As a businessman, he had it down to a fine art. “You knew what was in that goddamned time capsule, didn’t you, Dad?”

“Why the hell are you taking that tone with me?” Josef blustered. “How would I know?”

“There was a reason you didn’t want her to go. Tell me what you know.”

Another pause. “What was in the capsule?”

“You tell me first.”

His father muttered something Jakob took for profanities. “I don’t know what she put in there. She said some cryptic things about it, that’s all. Stuff about how in fifty years, the Wakefield College people would find out there was a dead body in there. Made no sense, but I got to say, it made me nervous.”

“There were no bodies, but maybe the next best thing.” Jakob stared out the French doors at an idyllic garden, golden in the evening light and too pretty for his current mood. “I remember your fights with Michelle. I heard you accusing her of trapping you.”

“You were a kid. Why would you remember anything like that?”

He turned his back on the garden and took a few steps into the kitchen, where he could lean a hip against the counter. “Be straight with me, Dad.”

After a long silence, Josef said, “I don’t want Amy to know any of this.”

“The horses are already out, Dad. Too late.”

He could hear his father breathing. “Oh, hell,” Josef said finally.

“So you know?” That enraged Jakob. Hadn’t it occurred to either his father or Michelle that a secret like this had the potential to be more destructive than the truth ever would have been?

“All I know is, Amy isn’t mine.”

Jakob found himself reeling even though he didn’t move a muscle. All these years, and now he knew.

She’s not my sister.

The part that stunned him, and yet didn’t, was that his primary emotion was relief. Relief so potent, it poured through him like a drug injected in his veins.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” Josef said gruffly. “She fell off the monkey bars at school. Had what turned out to be a mild concussion, but she also bled like crazy from a cut on the head and her nose, too. At the hospital they checked her blood type. I knew her mother’s and I know mine. Amy doesn’t have either.”

Well, that seemed definitive.

Not my sister. Not my sister.

The relief could have been a full chorus singing, full-throated. He staggered back to the table and sank onto a chair.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“Because I couldn’t tell her.” His father cleared his throat. “She’s a sweet girl. She didn’t deserve to find out something like that. I love Amy. As far as I’m concerned, she’s my daughter.”

“You didn’t trust me.”

“When you were a kid? Hell, no!”

“As an adult?” Jakob kneaded the back of his neck.

“You didn’t have anything to do with her. What difference did it make?”

A grunt escaped him. For the first time ever, he faced his own truth. From the time she was twelve or so and getting a figure, he had always felt things for Amy that were mind-blowingly inappropriate for a brother to feel. He’d been pretty sure she wasn’t his sister—but not a hundred percent. What if the sprite he was lusting for was his half sister? The horror and guilt had just about killed him.

Right this minute, it was his father he would have liked to kill.

He unclenched his teeth. “I always suspected. It mattered, Dad. My suspicions got in the way of any kind of relationship we might have had.”

And what kind of relationship would that have been? an inner voice taunted him. He ignored it.

The shower upstairs had shut off some time ago although he hadn’t yet heard her footsteps on the stairs. “I’ve got to go,” he said to his father.

“Like hell you do! What was in the time capsule?”

“I think it’s Amy’s right to tell you or not. It’s not good, though, I’ll say that much. She’s having a hard time dealing with it.”

A pause extended. “Will you be seeing her?”

“Yeah.” Any minute.

“Tell her I love her. I always have.”

Jakob felt himself relax infinitesimally. That helped. It definitely helped. “Okay, Dad,” he said. “I’ll do that.”

He didn’t hear her coming at all. The first he knew, he caught a hint of movement out of the corner of his eye and there she was in the doorway.

She stared at him defiantly as she walked across the kitchen. Jakob was struck by how stiff she was. Usually she was as light as air, hardly seeming to touch the ground. It occurred to him that he never had been able to count on hearing her approach.

“He’s gone?”

The phone lay in front of him on the table. She was looking at him, not the phone.

“Yeah.”

“Are you going to tell me what he said?”

“I told you I would.”

The relief had metamorphosed into something else. Jakob had no idea what he was feeling now. All he knew was that, for the first time in his life, he was letting himself fully see her as a woman. As such, he was almost sorry she’d showered and changed out of the thin tank top and low-slung pajama bottoms into jeans and a sacky sweatshirt. The jeans did a heck of a job molding hips that weren’t quite boyish, though. And he realized that, though he hadn’t consciously noticed earlier, when he pushed his way into the house, he had definitely been aware of her breasts. They weren’t large, but he’d been able to make out their shape just fine. He imagined them nestled in the palms of his hands and was damn glad he was sitting down, because he was getting aroused.

Guilt jabbed, but he stomped on it. Not my sister. He couldn’t help wondering if the seismic shift had fully hit her yet, and if so what the realization meant to her.

Oh, hell, what was he thinking? She was dealing with her mother’s lies, with his father’s lies, with the knowledge that she was very likely the product of rape, and he was rejoicing because he didn’t have to feel guilty anymore for wanting her.

What she needed right now was a friend. A brother. The understanding sobered him. That might be all she’d ever want from him. If it was, he would give her what she needed. There were too many years when he’d hurt her as much or more than Michelle and his dad had. He owed her.

“Sit.”

She sat, but indignantly. “I’m not a dog.”

His grin came despite his plunge in mood. “No, you’re not.”

Her spine didn’t touch the back of the chair. Her neck stretched so long it had to hurt, and that pointy chin thrust out. “So?”

“He found out you weren’t his when you fell off the bars at school. I’d kind of forgotten about that.”

She frowned. “I knocked myself out.”

“And bled. A lot, according to Dad. I don’t know if they were thinking transfusion or what, but they checked your blood type.”

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