The Winter Sister(84)

“No, he doesn’t! I told you already, I saved everything he ever gave me. And anyway, why would he send me money now, huh? He’s had no reason to for a very long time.”

“Why not? Because the affair’s been over since Persephone died?”

There was a beat of silence before she responded. “Yes.”

She was lying—or, at the very least, withholding. There was something I was still missing. I could almost make it out; it pulsed beneath her skin like a vein.

“So he really hasn’t given you a single dime since . . .”

The rest of the sentence crumbled in my mouth. I clamped my lips shut, holding the words tightly between my teeth. Then I swallowed them, sharp as a jagged crust of bread. I was struggling to put it all together, but every part of it was blurred. Will had sent my mother money for years, and had only stopped when Persephone died.

“Oh my God.”

I was forgetting how to breathe. I couldn’t get my chest to expand or contract.

“Oh my God.”

“Sylvie, please . . .”

“He’s her father, isn’t he? Will Emory is Persephone’s father.”

As I looked her in the eyes, I drank the air in shaky, uneven gulps. Silence spread through the space between us, and I watched as she walked toward Persephone’s bed, her steps like an old woman’s. Easing herself onto the blue quilt, she sat down without a squeak or groan from the decades-old mattress.

Then, finally, in a voice as creaky as a coffin being pried open, she answered, “Yes.”





26




“Oh my God.”

“Please stop saying that.”

“You never told us!” I cried, shooting up from my bed. “How could you—why wouldn’t you—”

“I promised Will I’d keep it a secret,” Mom cut in. “He was married when I got pregnant. Do you have any idea what a scandal like that would have done to him? It would have rocked his whole family, his whole career! He was already campaigning at that point. He was going to be the youngest mayor this town ever had. So he asked me to keep it quiet.”

“And you agreed to that?” My voice was so shrill I barely recognized it. “You agreed to keep your daughter in the dark and accept his hush money?”

“It wasn’t hush money! It was money for Persephone—child support, if you want to call it that. I was saving it up for her in a college fund, letting it accumulate interest. Really, Sylvie. Do you think so little of me that you honestly believe I’d blackmail him into giving me money to keep our secret? I loved him, and he needed this from me. I would have done it for free!”

“Persephone wasn’t a secret, Mom. She was a human being. She was your fucking daughter.”

“And she was his, too. He had a right to be part of that decision.”

“No, he didn’t,” I spit out, shaking my head. “No, he did not have even an ounce of—”

I stopped, my mind pummeling off the track it was on and hitching onto another. She was his, too, she’d just said. But Ben was also his. And Ben and Persephone had been each other’s. Ben had probably put his hand on her cheek when he kissed her, like he’d just done to me. He had probably run his fingers through her hair, grazed his teeth against the skin of her shoulder. And just as his tension and desire began to brim over, he must have pressed his hipbones against Persephone’s, then drained himself into her, gasping and grunting for breath.

“Do you, do you have any idea what this means?” I sputtered. “Persephone—she—she dated Ben. She dated her—oh God, I can’t even say it—her brother.”

“Half brother,” Mom corrected.

“Oh, well never mind, then, I guess that—”

I sucked in a breath. It hadn’t even been an hour since I’d left Ben’s house, since he’d brushed his lips against my cheek at the door, a gentle acknowledgment of what had passed between us—our bodies cresting and falling together on the bed, my legs clinging to his waist as I pulled him deeper and deeper inside me.

My heart was pounding when I asked my next question. “Mom,” I started. “Is Will my father, too?”

“No,” she said quickly.

“Is he?”

“No! Your father is a man named Eddie. I don’t even know his last name. I have no idea where he lives or who he is really.”

I watched her for a while, looking for the slightest tremor in her expression. Nothing happened, though, not even when I focused on the pulse that ticked in her temple, the dry skin at the corners of her mouth. She was telling the truth, I conceded—the bland, unpretty truth—and relief flooded my veins like a drug. But then, in just a few seconds, my anger snapped back into place, boiling me up inside.

“But Persephone is Will’s,” I said. “And so is Ben. And they were together. How could you let that happen?”

“Obviously I didn’t know it was happening. I told her she wasn’t allowed to see him.”

“But you never told her why!” I fired back. “So she had no idea when she saw him . . . when she went out with him . . . that she—she—”

“I didn’t know she was still seeing him! That’s not my fault!”