I backed away.
“No.”
“Carly—”
“Your husband was my father?”
“Yes.”
The word destroyed everything.
Harold.
The smiling man in the photographs I had dusted every Thursday.
The wedding ring I had found.
The man Margaret spoke about with tenderness.
My father.
And according to Rose, the man who had tried to erase me.
I felt sick.
“You knew?”
“Not when I married him.”
“But later?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“After his death.”
Rose shouted, “Liar!”
Margaret flinched.
“You knew before!”
Evelyn stepped between them.
“Mom, tell the truth.”
Margaret looked twenty years older.
“I suspected.”
“Suspected what?”
“That Harold had been involved
with Rose.”
“Involved?”
“He assaulted her.”
My stomach turned.
Rose covered her face.
And suddenly I understood why no one had ever used the word affair.
There had not been one.
Margaret kept speaking.
“Harold was twenty-eight.
Rose was sixteen.”
My entire body went cold.
“That’s impossible.
