“Huh?” Park looks up, unseeing for a moment, until his brain clears of whatever he’s writing, and he is able to focus on her again.
“Honey. You’re home,” he says, leaning back so quickly that the chair tips precariously.
“A reporter just called.”
He pushes away from the desk and stands as if to hug her, but she steps back, and his arms hang empty in the air, a parenthesis of confusion, before dropping to his side.
“They’ve been trying my cell, too. I haven’t answered. I don’t know what they want me to say. And I thought you and I should talk first, before I discuss anything with anyone outside the family.”
She crosses her arms on her chest. “All right. Talk. Who is this mysterious mother who’s had your child?”
“I honestly have no idea. I swear. Please, will you just sit down for a minute? You’re making me nervous.”
She blows out a breath and sinks into the chair across from his desk. It is dark brown leather, cracked in multiple places, missing nails along its border, and needs to be replaced. She hates it. He loves it.
Welcome to marriage.
“I need to tell you something,” Park says.
He looks as nervous as he did the night she confronted him about screwing Alison damn Banks the summer after their senior year.
He hands her a file.
“Winterborn Life Sciences? Park, what is this?”
“My second year in grad school, one of the guys from the fraternity who was in medical school reached out to see if I’d be interested in donating sperm.”
She drops the folder on his desk. “You didn’t.”
He rounds the desk and kneels at her feet. “I did.”
She pulls her feet under the chair to stop herself from kicking him in the groin. The rage is bubbling again, just below the surface. She already knows what he is going to say.
“And?”
“And it’s possible there are more children.”
8
THE DAUGHTER
Scarlett Flynn was eight years old when she realized something wasn’t right about her family. To start with, she had no father. All of her friends had fathers. Some had two fathers, an indulgence she couldn’t imagine. All Scarlett had was a mother who worked the night shift at Vanderbilt’s children’s oncology unit, a brother who was five years older and imperious as hell, and a nanny who liked to sneak cigarettes on the back porch and watch R-rated horror movies with the sound down.
As a result, teenage Scarlett hates both horror films and cigarettes, and is wildly jealous of families with fathers.
Your donor. That’s how her mother refers to Scarlett’s father. “Your donor was a college graduate with blond hair and blue eyes and a clean medical family history. What more do you need to know?”
What more?
Does he have a beard? Does he play Frisbee? Does he like dogs? Cheese pizza, or the works?
Did he sire other children?
It was that last thought that drove Scarlett to save up all of her allowance money and buy the DNA kit that you send off to learn your heritage. Not that Peyton isn’t enough; he is a good brother, for the most part, unless teasing her about her first bra or withholding the remote, but Scarlett sensed there was more. She has talents that her mother’s biology can’t explain. She is destined for great things, this she knows in her heart, and finding out who she is? That’s the key to everything.
It doesn’t feel like much to ask, learning who her biological father is. She is proud of her mother, the sacrifices Darby’s made, how she managed to keep both Scarlett and Peyton in private schools and build them substantial college funds. Darby is smart and hardworking and a lovely, fun mom, but intransigent when it comes to answering the real question—why have two kids with a sperm donor? She is pretty. She is smart. She is straight, for all that Scarlett knows, not that it matters one way or another.
And yet, she’d chosen to raise two kids by herself. Siblings. She wanted a boy and a girl, Darby said, and that’s why she’d chosen this route. She wanted children she knew were healthy, and that’s why she had chosen this route. Could you blame her, spending all day with sick kids, that she’d want ones of her own not afflicted?
None of the answers were satisfying to Scarlett, who yearned for the whole story.
Plus, there was one glitch in her otherwise detailed and well-executed plan. Peyton and Scarlett were supposed to have the same father, but technically, she and Peyton are only half siblings.
Scarlett asked, but why not use the same guy for both? Isn’t that the normal thing to do?
The answer was another one of cool logic—“I wanted to, but his sample had been retired. They only allow the samples to be used a very limited number of times so a client doesn’t end up with five hundred kids.”
“You hear of that happening all the time, though,” was Scarlett’s argument, and her mom would simply smile and say, “I worked with the best clinic in town, one that was extremely ethical and would never do something like that.”
Whatever DNA Peyton’s father and Scarlett’s had provided, clearly her mother’s was the stronger of the two, because both of them look just like her.
Which is another strange thing. Her friends with fathers all have elements of both their parents. No one is a dead ringer, but both Darby and Peyton have their mom’s heart-shaped face, cleft chin, lime-green eyes and thick, dark curls, though Scarlett’s are auburn.
What her mom doesn’t know is the management of her extremely ethical best clinic in town isn’t quite as aboveboard as she thinks. Scarlett hasn’t broken the news to her just yet, because there’s going to be huge fight when she finds out Scarlett went behind her back, got her DNA checked, and discovered the truth: there are a whole bunch of kids out in the world with the same dad DNA. She has been conversing online with her half siblings for the past few months. Unethical or illegal, whatever it is labeled, Scarlett knows there are a lot more siblings than there should be. Now she has a lifetime membership to the Donor Sibling Registry, and any matches that pop she invites to a Discord server so they can talk freely in a safe, private environment. More matches seem to pop up weekly.
The first step every one of them took was to try and secure the DNA of their own siblings, if they had any. Scarlett has broken the rules and hasn’t reached out to Peyton. She really needs to tell him what’s going on and do it in person. But Peyton will tell their mother, and Scarlett can’t let Darby know what’s happening just yet. Her mom’s going to hit the roof.
Scarlett had always been driven by sussing out information about her donor. Peyton had always shrugged it off. He didn’t want to know. Didn’t want a dad. He was perfectly fine without one, always had been. Handsome, gregarious Peyton, with that curly hair just the same shade as their mom’s, the matching dimple in his chin a little more pronounced, his laughing baritone and string of girlfriends. He is a junior at MTSU and loving every minute of school so far. She needs to drive to Murfreesboro to talk to him about this—FaceTime won’t do. The rest of the bio-kids are pushing her to get him tested. She doesn’t know how much longer she can put them off. But really, what does it matter? She’s been in her mom’s filing cabinet. She’s seen the donor profiles and all the paperwork. She and Peyton have different biological fathers. There is no need to involve him in this part of things. The science part.