Madly (New York 2)

Winston shook his head. “You’re going to have to explain that.”

I don’t have to explain shit to you.

It was her first instinct, the one she too often obeyed—to push him away, burn the bridge, make the impulsive decision.

But his mouth had already relaxed from the thin, hard line of a moment earlier. He was kneeling on the floor of a dirty bar in an expensive suit because he wanted to help her, and he didn’t deserve for her to dump on him just because she was having what ranked as one of the top-three worst moments of her life.

Just because she didn’t want to tell him how she knew what she knew. What she’d known since the number-one worst moment of her life.

She blew out a breath. “He’s my father. Justin Olejniczak. That’s my real father’s name. My birth father, I guess I’m supposed to say, not my ‘real’ father, because my real father’s the one who told me the summer after I graduated high school that he wasn’t actually my dad.”

Winston went very still, his eyes focused on a spot somewhere past her right ear. “That man—the man with your mother.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s your father.”

“He’s my birth father. My father in haploid cell, only. Not even in name.”

And then Winston didn’t say anything, and Allie looked at the pinball machine, the lights and colors, the looping music, and put her hand over her heart, surprised.

She’d never told anyone before.

Not her sister, not Sal at the antique shop, not Matt, not Elvira. She’d wanted to, sometimes—to shout at May when she was angry, You’re not even my sister! Or to scream it into the crowd at the Badgers stadium, everyone cheering for the touchdown while she yelled the truth to no one at all.

But she never did it, because when her dad sat her down that summer and choked out her family’s deepest secret, he’d made her complicit in the lies.

Your mother doesn’t like to talk about it, he’d said, and she’d asked him, Who knows?

Me and you and Mom, he’d said. And him.

It was the summer she’d put together all the pieces. Who she was. Where her mother went. What her family really was, and why her parents stayed together.

Not for her—the daughter of infidelity, the lapse, the mistake.

For May.

She loved her sister just as much as her parents did. Maybe more. So she’d kept the secret, too, kept up appearances, and she’d never really thought about how heavy it was, the terrible weight of it, until she let it go and felt lighter.

Probably that just meant she wasn’t much good at carrying burdens, and needed more practice.

Winston touched her knee.

She wished he’d stop, just stop. She plucked up her hat off the chair back behind her and dropped it into her lap, slid bobby pins off the band and held them between tight lips, gathered her hair between her hands and began to twist it into a tight spiral.

She stabbed in the first pin. Crossed it with a second. Winston kept looking at her, steady and calm. “I know that man with your mother,” he said. “I’ve sat in this bar with him. He’s an associate of mine.”

Allie placed another pair of bobby pins.

“He’s an artist.”

“I know,” she mumbled around the remaining pins.

“Did you know he’s quite famous?”

“I Googled him.”

“Sorry?”