Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six(75)

“Maybe she changed her mind about wanting to connect. Maybe she was surprised by what she found.”

That happened a lot, he’d gleaned from his research. Some people wish they’d never sent in the kit. They thought they were one thing, then discovered they were something else altogether. What they learned about themselves and their family they couldn’t unlearn.

“Well, I did some digging around and I found a Marta Bennet living up in the Bronx, in Riverdale. I went up there.”

He found this surprising. The woman sitting across from him, this found sister, had silken dark hair much like his, the same searing intensity to her gaze that Piper always commented on in Henry. Dial it back, honey. You make people nervous. The same high cheekbones, long nose. Cat’s features were puzzle pieces that fit with his; it was comforting in a strange way, to be of a piece with another person. But there was something about her that unsettled Henry. A boldness, a kind of edgy determination.

“You did? You went to see her?”

“Yeah,” said Cat. She took off her glasses and rubbed at her eyes. “I basically stalked her. Waited around her apartment building, looking for a woman who maybe looked a little like me.”

The bartender came and brought another round, a fresh tea, another bourbon, a vodka soda for Cat though they hadn’t ordered.

“On the house,” he said, giving Cat a smile. The bartender was, as Henry predicted, thickly muscled, bearded, with full sleeves of tattoos. A type.

“Thanks, Max,” she said. “You’re the best.”

“Regular here?” asked Henry after the other man was back behind the bar.

“Max and I are—friends. I met him actually at a Donor Sibling conference.”

“He’s not—?”

“Related to us? No,” she said. “But his father was a sperm donor. They’ve met; not a love connection. Sometimes the biology is there but the chemistry isn’t, right? Anyway, there are a lot of us, looking for answers.”

He was getting that. Maybe when it came to family, there were more questions than answers for some people. Maybe some people had to live with that.

“So, you were stalking Marta. Did you connect?”

Cat took a breath, shook her head.

“She wouldn’t talk to me. I approached her when she was coming home from work one night. I introduced myself politely, asked if she would have a coffee with me, answer some questions.”

“But she refused?”

Something flashed across Cat’s face—anger, frustration. But it passed quickly and left the shape of sadness around her eyes.

“She more than refused. She looked—terrified. She said she made a horrible mistake, that she never should have taken the test. And if I knew what was good for me I would stop looking for my father.”

Henry tried to imagine it. A gray street in the Bronx, Cat approaching a stranger on the sidewalk, blocking her way home. He wouldn’t have done that; wouldn’t have had the nerve.

“Huh,” said Henry. “What does that mean?”

Cat shrugged, looked down at her glass. He thought she wasn’t going to answer. But then, “She said something like ‘Your father. He’s a bad man and you don’t want to know him. Whatever piece of him is inside you—exorcise it.’”

“Exercise?”

“Like exorcise—as in demons. She pushed past me but I followed her to her front door. I’m not embarrassed to say that I begged her to tell me more, even just his name. But she went inside and said if I came back she’d call the police.”

Cat stopped a second, took off her glasses again and wiped angrily at her eyes. He waited. Didn’t press. “So I hung around awhile,” she went on. “It was cold, about to snow. I thought maybe she’d see me waiting, feel sorry for me, come back out. But it got later, colder, and finally I left.”

“Okay, wow,” said Henry, not knowing what else to say.

“The next day, her Facebook account had been deleted. And she was no longer available for messaging on the Origins site.”

The sadness was gone from Cat’s face, a kind of closed-off hardness was left in its place.

“Maybe I could try to reach out,” Henry suggested.

Cat shook her head, looked down at her drink. “No.”

“Or my aunt Gemma, my mother’s sister. She has a way with people. They talk to her.” Gemma did; there was a warmth, a kind nonjudgment that encouraged people to open themselves to her. If anyone could get this woman to talk it was his aunt. He was about to press, but Cat raised a slender palm.

“Marta Bennet,” Cat started then stopped, took a long swallow of her drink. “She—um—she died.”

“Wait, what? How?”

“It appears she killed herself, like she jumped off the top of her building a couple days after I went to talk to her. Police said it might have been an accident.”

Henry didn’t know what to say, so he just looked down at his hands. He felt his heart beating in his throat.

“And she’s not the only one,” Cat went on.

Henry frowned at her. “Okay.”

“Five of our half siblings have died over the last five years. They started looking for answers about their origins, and at some point after that, they were gone.”