The Watcher Girl(51)

Is she scared of starting over?

Or scared of what Sutton will do when he wakes up to find his wife drugged him and ran off with their daughter?

My eyes squint and water, hypnotized by the stretch of gray road ahead, and I avoid checking the time. I’m aware that it’s late. It would’ve been nice to have left a few hours ago, but nothing I can do about that now.

“Do you mind if we stop for a coffee before we hit the interstate?” I yawn at the sight of a twenty-four-hour gas station ahead.

“Of course not,” she says. “I could use one myself.”

I pull into the parking lot of the Quik Stop-n-Go on Highland. The only other car here is parked behind the building, its driver’s door a different color than the rest of it. Campbell stays with Gigi, and I run inside to grab us a couple of watered-down cappuccinos, a granola bar, and a bag of crackers. I couldn’t possibly eat right now, but I should have something on hand just in case.

Ten minutes later, a weak boost of caffeine hits my system. I haven’t yawned for miles. I check Campbell in my side view and determine she’s as wide awake as I am.

“You mind if we talk?” I ask. “I’d turn the radio on, but I don’t want to wake Gigi.”

“Not at all,” she says.

Good.

Because I have questions.

I grip the wheel at a nine-and-three position, not a perfect ten-and-two. And softly clear my throat.

“There’s no easy way to ask you this,” I say, “and I don’t want to sound paranoid, but what makes you . . . how did you . . . why do you think we’re sisters?”

Campbell melts back in her seat, adjusting her posture, taking her time. “My dad—our dad—told me after he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, about ten years ago or so. He thought he was going to die, I guess. Didn’t want to die with this secret.”

I think of his smiling, generic face in the “RIP DAD!” picture.

“He ended up living another seven, eight years after that,” she says. “It got him the second time around.”

Road noise fills the silence between us.

“My mom still doesn’t know,” she adds. “He never wanted to hurt her. She thought I was his first daughter, his only daughter. It would’ve devastated her to know he lied to her. It took them a long time to have me. They were almost forty when I came along. Total surprise. Anyway, Dad kept tabs on you your whole life. He told me your name, where you grew up, told me we looked like twins.”

I try to do the math, but my brain is on cheaply caffeinated fumes. “My mom was fifteen when she had me. And you’re, what . . . a couple of years younger than me?”

She’s quiet, and then she nods. “He said he’d had an affair with a younger woman. I never realized how young she was until I read that book about your family.”

I imagine Campbell poring over that tell-all book, devouring facts about me and my childhood, and a shiver runs through me, as if I’m naked, exposed. I hate that anyone can waltz into a bookstore and grab a story so personal, so unauthorized.

“So your dad was more than twice my birth mother’s age,” I say.

Campbell sighs. “He had demons. And he was far from a saint.”

Maybe my darkness and contempt for societal norms are inherited, like a gnarled, broken gene. This would make sense.

“I don’t want you thinking you missed out on some amazing fatherly experience,” Campbell says as she angles toward me, the whites of her eyes reflecting in the headlights of an oncoming car. “He loved whiskey more than anything in the world. But when he wasn’t drinking, he’d embarrass me in front of my friends with corny jokes or take me fishing at the lake. Typical dad stuff. But those days were few and far between. There were more whiskey days than anything else.”

I try to imagine a different childhood, one with fewer floral arrangements and ballet lessons and more corny jokes, fishing trips, and drunken fatherly advice.

“I wish we could’ve met sooner,” she says. “Before all of . . . this.”

“Do you have any pictures of him?” The image from her Instaface account flashes in my head. I don’t share a single feature with that man, and I wouldn’t say Campbell shares much with him either—which would suggest she takes after her mother. But age and time have a way of warping those things. And genetics can be complicated.

“I’ll dig some up for you sometime, sure,” she says.

Sometime . . .

There’s no urgency or guarantee in her voice. Then again, her priorities in this moment have more to do with safety than convincing me of something she already believes to be gospel.

I conjure a memory of Sarah Thomas and how she lied to me before, and the thought brings a tightness to the back of my throat. Sarah was disturbed and unwell, though, and Campbell is unassuming and benign. What reason would she have to make this up? I don’t have anything to offer anyone. No fame or fortune. No mansion by the sea. No political influence. No connections. Nothing about my life is remotely enviable. There’s not a single thing Campbell could gain by claiming to be my half sister.

There’s a chance her father lied. Or maybe he had his information wrong. Maybe my mother slept with another man, and her father simply assumed the baby was his? Stranger things have happened. And people spend their entire lives believing things are one way only to find out (or never find out) that they were wrong.