Pretty, Dark and Dirty

“I miss sitting for you,” I confessed, wondering if he missed sketching me. “Mom lets me draw her sometimes, but she fidgets.”

“She always did.” He studied me for a long moment. “She doesn’t know you’re here, does she?”

I stiffened. “She knows I’m in New York.”

“But she doesn’t know you’re here to see me.”

Funny, how the man who’d deceived me all those years could still make me feel guilty for lying to my mother.

When Mason and I began texting a few weeks ago, I still believed he was my father. One day, my mom saw his number flash across my phone, and in a flurry of tears and shouting, the likes of which I’d never seen from her before, she spluttered the truth: Mason wasn’t my father, so there was no point in trying to reconnect with him—and no, she wasn’t going to tell me who my real father was, no matter how hard I begged her.

Learning the truth just about shattered me all over again. I typed up a scathing message to Mason and came close to hitting send before I realized…if Mason had known my mother around the time she was pregnant with me, he might know something about my real father. At the very least, I wanted the chance to confront him in person about lying to me.

I still had every intention of confronting him today—assuming I could resist the temptation of slipping into old, familiar roles.

“She thinks I’m staying with friends,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter. I’m eighteen. I don’t need her permission to visit you, or anyone.”

Mason speared a piece of my cold gnocchi and brought it to his lips. His gaze never left me, not even as he chewed.

“She told you, didn’t she?”

I blinked, frozen. “Told me what?”

“We’ve been sitting across from each other for almost two hours, and not once have you called me Dad. I have a hunch it’s because you know the truth.”

“Which is?”

His throat shifted as he swallowed. “I’m not your biological father.”

There it was, the truth from the lying horse’s mouth. I thought hearing him say it would feel vindicating, but all I felt was disheartened, and embarrassed at the tiny, vulnerable part of me that’d hoped it wasn’t true.

“Why are you really here, Jetty?”

I had considered saving my interrogation for another day, but with the truth hanging in the air between us and the questions burning a pit in my stomach, I couldn’t hold back.

“I want you to tell me who my real father is.”

Chapter Two

I don’t know who your father is,” Mason said. “Gretchen never told me.”

Bullshit. “You’re telling me you agreed to raise some stranger’s kid without knowing all the details first?”

He blinked slowly. “I didn’t agree to raise a stranger’s kid. I thought I was raising my own.”

I winced at the flash of pain in his eyes. The possibility that my mother had lied to both of us had occurred to me, but I’d dismissed the notion outright. Frankly, it was easier to be mad at both of them.

“When did you find out I wasn’t yours?”

“The night I took you out for ice cream after the movie. I thought Gretchen was going to chew me out for keeping you up on a school night... Turns out, she had other things to discuss.”

I wished I could recall the details of that outing; if I’d known it would be our last, I’d have paid better attention.

I could only imagine how painful it must’ve been to discover the daughter he’d helped raise belonged to someone else. Still, it didn’t justify his disappearing act after he’d been my father for twelve years.

“Is that why you left?” I asked. “Because you found out I wasn’t really yours?”

His mouth tipped into a smirk. “I’m surprised Gretchen didn’t tell you that part.”