Ryan stood.
“Nothing happened,” he said quickly.
“Iris, nothing happened between us tonight.
When my dad called, I ended the date.
We came straight back.”
She looked at him, stunned.
Ryan continued, his voice shaking now.
“We danced.
That’s it.
I swear.”
Iris pressed both hands over her mouth.
Prom had ended with one phone call because the boy she’d gone with had discovered that the girl beside him might be his half sister.
Daniel stepped toward Iris.
She recoiled.
He stopped instantly.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t,” Iris whispered.
Daniel froze.
She looked at me.
“You knew?”
That question hurt more than any accusation could have.
“I knew Daniel was your biological father.”
“For eighteen years?”
“Yes.”
“And you never told me?”
“No.”
She laughed once, but there was no humor in it.
“You let me think he left us.”
I shook my head.
“I never told you that.”
“You didn’t have to.
Every time I asked where he was, you said he wasn’t part of our lives.
Every Father’s Day at school, every time somebody asked, every time I wondered what I’d done wrong—you knew exactly who he was.”
“You did nothing wrong.”
“Then why wasn’t he there?”
Daniel answered before I could.
“Because I didn’t know.”
Iris turned toward him.
Daniel looked devastated.
“Your mother disappeared from my life before I knew she was pregnant.”
I felt anger rise through the shame.
“That’s not the whole story.”
“Then tell the whole story,” Iris said.
There was no softness in her voice now.
So I did.
Eighteen years earlier, Daniel and I had been twenty-four and convinced we understood what forever meant.
We didn’t.
We were deeply in love and spectacularly unprepared for everything surrounding that love.
Daniel had just accepted a job across the country.
I had been offered a teaching position near my mother, who was ill at the time.
We argued for weeks about whose future should bend.
Then I discovered I was pregnant.
I intended to tell him the same evening.
Before I could, we had the worst argument of our relationship.
Daniel accused me of expecting him to abandon every opportunity for my family.
I accused him of wanting a future that had room for me only when it was convenient.
