Page 78 of The Charade

The handsome face that couldn’t belong to anyone related to me.

Right?

"Yes," he said after a second, pointing to a spot on the top. "He's right there."

"So there's only one photo of them posing together," I said, trying to persuade everyone that it was all just a major coincidence. Elyse was probably just making something out of nothing because she wanted to know who our dad was as much as I did.

But Elyse just nodded toward the papers I held and said, "There's one more."

I switched the papers around so I could look at the last photo Elyse had printed off. In this one, my mom was sandwiched between Mr. Hastings and another guy with brown hair who I didn't recognize and who was the same height as Carter's dad. Mack's dad was standing on the other side of Mr. Hastings.

My mom may have been standing slightly closer to Mr. Hastings in the last photo, but that didn't necessarily mean that anything was going on between them that night.

"I don't think this proves anything," I said to Elyse, handing the papers back to her. "It just shows that Mom and Carter's dad were at the same party one night. I think you're doing a lot of mental gymnastics to make this work in your mind."

"You think so?" Elyse raised her eyebrows at me, folding her arms. "Then why don't you ask me when this reunion happened?"

"When did it happen?" Carter asked, looking between my sister and me as if trying to figure this puzzle out.

A strange mix of hope and fear swirled in my gut as I waited for my sister to answer.

Elyse pressed her lips together, and only after my palms had begun to sweat did she say, "It was July twenty-ninth."

July twenty-ninth?

Elyse just stared at me with eyes that were identical to mine, waiting for me to piece together the puzzle she had already solved. But when I didn't understand what she was trying to tell me, she added, "It was July twenty-ninth the summer before we were born."

Oh.

That summer…

My whole body went tingly and a heavy feeling filled my chest, because though I'd been searching for this answer for my entire life, I suddenly wanted to un-hear everything that Elyse had just told me.

Even though I'd never been that great at math, based on the fact that Elyse and I had been born two weeks early, if you subtracted nine months from our due date, we would have been conceived around the end of July or beginning of August of the year our mom had turned twenty-three.

Which meant, our mom had likely gotten pregnant the weekend of her high school reunion.

And there was a huge chance that Carter was our half-brother.

31

Carter

"Areyou trying to say that your mom got pregnant with you at her high school reunion?" I asked Elyse and Ava after they explained to me why July twenty-ninth was such a significant date to them. "Are you saying that based on the fact that our parents dated seriously in high school and then ended up in a few photos together at their high school reunion, it means my dad was the guy who helped her out with that?"

"We're just saying that he's the strongest candidate we've ever found," Elyse said, watching me with wary eyes, like she was worried I might explode if she said the wrong thing.

And I guess she wasn't far off. Because if I was related to the girl I'd just been making out with a few minutes ago—if I was thebrotherof the girl I'd had fantasies about more times than I'd ever admit—I might just punch a hole through the wall.

Or throw up.

I couldn't decide which urge would win out at the moment.

"So you're saying that our parents slept together this night, and that my dad either didn't know about your existence until very recently, or just chose not to take care of you for the past eighteen years because of some reasons we don't know about?"

"I don't know." Elyse raised her hands in the air. "I'm just figuring these things out right now." She sighed. "It's just what makes the most sense. And with your dad's history of sleeping around and making babies he didn't know about…I guess it's not too unbelievable."

Even though she was talking about my dad and not me, it almost felt like she'd slapped me in the face.

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