Chapter 7: The Daughter He Never Mentioned
I sat down on the bottom stair.
I didn't decide to sit.
My legs made the decision without me.
"She's thirty-one years old," I said.
It wasn't a question.
"Yes."
"You've been married to me for nine years."
"Yes."
"So she existed before us."
"She was twenty-two when I found out about her.
Her mother — we were together briefly, before I met you.
She never told me.
Delia tracked me down herself."
I stared at the floor.
The hallway tile.
A small scuff near the baseboard I had been meaning to clean for months.
"And the flat," I said.
"The account."
"I was trying to make up for lost time.
She had nothing.
Her mother had struggled her whole life.
I wanted to—" He stopped.
"I should have told you.
I know that."
"You structured a shell company."
"I didn't want it to become a legal issue before I understood what she wanted from me."
"And the $15,000 at Lumina Jewelers the morning you left?"
A pause.
"Her birthday is next week."
I pressed my hand flat against the cold tile of the stair.
"Everett," I said.
"I might have understood this.
If you had told me.
I might have been angry, but I would have understood."
"I know."
"Instead you left me in that house with your mother and told me to be a better daughter-in-law."
"Stella—"
"Does Shirley know?
That Delia is your daughter?"
The pause was a fraction too long.
"Yes," he said.
I closed my eyes.
"She knew," I said.
"She knew the whole time, and she still stood in my kitchen and called me ungrateful."
"My mother was trying to protect—"
"Don't." My voice came out very quiet.
"Don't tell me who she was trying to protect."
I heard him exhale.
"I'm coming home," he said.
"Three days.
Just — don't do anything else until I get there.
Please."
I didn't answer that.
"Patricia will be in touch," I said, and ended the call.
I sat on the bottom stair for a while longer.
From the kitchen, I could hear Shirley moving.
The sound of a plate being set down.
The tap running.
The ordinary sounds of a woman making herself at home in someone else's house.
I thought about Delia Marsh — thirty-one years old, living in a Kensington flat, receiving jewelry for her birthday from a father who had hidden her existence from his wife like a financial liability.
I thought about what it cost her, too.
Then I stood up, walked to the kitchen doorway, and looked at Shirley.
She was washing the breakfast dishes with her back to me.
"He told me," I said.
Her hands slowed under the water but didn't stop.
"About Delia," I said.
The tap went off.
Shirley stood with her back to me, both hands resting on the edge of the sink, and said nothing for a long moment.
Then she turned around.
Her expression was not what I expected.
It wasn't defiance.
It wasn't the cold superiority I had lived with for nine years.
It was something much closer to exhaustion.
"She's a good girl," Shirley said quietly.
"Whatever you think of the rest of it — she's a good girl and none of this was her fault."
It was the first true thing Shirley had said to me in nine years.
It didn't fix anything.
But it landed differently than I expected.
May you like
And somewhere in the back of my mind, a question I hadn't thought to ask yet began to take shape.
If Delia was innocent — what did she actually know about where that money came from?
