Sabine stared at me.
“You really don’t know?”
“Know what?”
Her expression changed.
For the first time, she looked less guilty than confused.
“About Dad.”
I felt a chill.
“Our father has been dead for nineteen years.”
“No.”
My breath stopped.
Sabine shook her head.
“The man we called Dad has been dead for nineteen years.”
I said nothing.
Sabine whispered:
“He wasn’t your father.”
My real father was named Thomas Rowe.
Not Mercer.
Not the man whose surname I had carried as a child.
Thomas had been twenty-four when he met my mother.
She was married.
He was a junior attorney.
Their affair lasted less than a year.
I was the result.
My grandmother knew.
My legal father knew.
Everyone agreed to bury the truth.
Thomas disappeared from Ashport before I was born.
But decades later, his name returned.
Kessler, Rowe and Finch.
Rowe.
The law firm receiving part of Preston’s forty-two thousand dollars.
My biological father had founded it.
I stared at Sabine.
“Thomas Rowe is alive?”
She nodded.
“He’s wealthy.”
“How wealthy?”
“I don’t know.”
“How does Mom know?”
“She never stopped knowing.”
Every assumption I had carried about my life shifted.
But Sabine was not finished.
“Thomas contacted Mom last year.”
“Why?”
“He was sick.”
My chest tightened.
“He wanted to meet you.”
I stared.
“Did he?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Mom wouldn’t let him.”
Anger flared.
“She had no right.”
“That wasn’t why.”
Sabine swallowed.
“Thomas changed his will.”
