given Jayne for OâDuffyâs visit. To make it more convincing, I embellished about how fatherly and kind OâDuffy had been and what a favor heâd been doing, stopping by. Crime was very high in Dublin, I told Dad, and I felt awful about OâDuffyâs death but really, police officers died on the job all the time and Jayne was just being a jack-petunia about it to me.
âAnd your hair?â
âYou donât like it?â It was hard to feign surprise when I hated it myself; I missed the weight of it, the different styles Iâd been able to wear, the swish of it when I walked. I was just grateful he hadnât seen me when Iâd still had all my splints on.
He gave me a look. âYou are kidding, right? Mac, baby, you had beautiful hair, long and blond like your motherâs â¦â He trailed off.
And there it was. I looked him dead in the eye. âWhich mother, Dad? Mom? Or the other oneâyou know, the one that gave me up for adoption?â
âYou want to go get some dinner, Mac?â
Men. Do they all evade as first line of defense?
We ordered delivery. I hadnât had a good pizza in forever, it was starting to rain again, and I was in no mood to go out in it. I ordered, Dad paid, just like old times when life was simple, and Daddy was always there to be my Friday night date whenever my latest boyfriend had been a jerk. I gathered paper plates and napkins from Fionaâs stash behind the register. Before sitting down with our pizza, I turned on all the exterior lights, and lit a cozy gas fire. For now, we were safe. I just had to keep him safe until morning, when I would somehow get him on a plane and send him home.
I keep a happy thought inside me at all times. I cling to it in my darkest moments: When all this is over, Iâm going to go back to Ashford and pretend none of this happened. Iâm going to find myself a man, get married, and have babies. I need both my parents at home, waiting for me because Iâm going to make little Lane girls, and weâre going to be a family again.
We kept the talk light through dinner. He told me that Mom was still lost in grief and not talking to anyone. Heâd hated leaving her, but heâd taken her to Gram and Grampâs and they were giving her the best of care. Thinking about Mom was too painful, so I turned the conversation to books. Dad loves to read as much as I do, and I knew that in his opinion there were far worse places he could have found me working, like another bar. We talked about new releases. I told him some of my plans for the store.
When dinner was over we pushed our plates back and regarded each other warily.
He began a somber âYou know your mother and I love youâ spiel, and I hushed him. I knew. I didnât have any doubts on that score. Iâd been forced to come to terms with so much in the past few weeks that making peace with my discovery that my parents were not my birth parents hadnât taken as long as Iâd expected. It had rocked my world, brutally shifted my paradigm, but regardless of whose sperm and egg had resulted in my conception, Jack and Rainey Lane had raised me with more love and unwavering support than most people ever know in a lifetime. If my biological parents were alive out there somewhere,
they
were my second set.
âI know, Dad. Just tell me.â
âHow did you find out, Mac?â
I told him an old woman had insisted I was someone else, about brown eyes and blue not making green, about calling the hospital to check on my birth records.
âWe knew this day might come.â He pushed a hand through his hair and sighed. âWhat do you want to know, Mac?â
âEverything,â I said in a low voice. âEvery last detail.â
âItâs not much.â
âAlina was my biological sister, wasnât she?â
He nodded. âShe was almost three, and you were nearly a year when the two of