Page 62 of Just Trouble

“Fifteen,” she says with defiance. I patented that tone when I was a teenager. “What’s it to you, old man?”

I turn to Sylvia. “Fifteen?Fifteen?”

“Sixteen in February,” Sierra provides.

Which means she was conceived in the spring. In May.

I fathered a child andI don’t even remember.

I did the one thing I always swore I would never ever do, and I didn’t even know it for sixteen years. There’s a failure of epic proportions.

The revelation makes me livid.

“What was in your head?” I demand of Sylvia. “How could you do this? How could you nottellme?”

She bristles, folding her arms across her chest. If looks could kill, I’d be a dead man. (Maybe Daph took pointers from Sylvia.) “It was none of your business,” she says, exuding enough frost to freeze half of North America.

“How can you say that?” I’m roaring now, not just because Daph has turned away. “How can you imagine that I didn’t have a right to know…”

Sylvia jabs a finger into my chest. “You. Did. Not. Turn around, Luke, and walk away. My life doesn’t concern you. It never did and it sure doesn’t now.”

I am incredulous. That she could cut me out of the life of my kid, that she would deliberately not tell me, is beyond every measure of decency. “You, you…” I’m sputtering. “I deserved to know.”

“Do you? Do you even remember that night?” she asks, her gaze hard.

It’s like she read my mind. I don’t. I remember running into her. I remember that she was upset with Mike for something. I remember encouraging her to come with me so we could pay Mike back for whatever he’d said or done.

I remember waking up on the porch at Una’s place, tucked under a quilt. (I remember puking in the woods.) I’ve never been able to stand the taste of Jägermeister since.

The next time I saw Sylvia was in Merrie’s restaurant in Toronto.

She shakes her head in disgust. “How can you imagine that I would change my life for a night you don’t even remember? It wasn’t an incident worth shaping my future choices.” I wince at her tone and she notices. “Be serious, Luke. We’re adults. I made choices for the good of my daughter and they weren’tyour concern.” She turns then, puts her arm around Sierra’s shoulders and leads the girl away.

Sierra looks back. “He’s my dad?”

“No,” Sylvia says, her voice hard. “You don’t have a dad. A dad is there when you need to be rocked to sleep. A dad is there when you have a fever, when you scrape your knee, when you get a good report card, when you ace your dance recital. A dad loves and cares for you, protects you and makes sure you’re safe. A dad cares. A dadremembers.” She tosses me a look. “You don’t have a dad, sweetheart, although I wish sometimes it was otherwise.”

“You didn’t tell me!” I bellow. “And I wasn’t hard to find!”

“Deal with it,” Sylvia says and the pair of them vanish into the diner.

I turn away, shaken, and find Daph watching me. She looks like she’s going to carve me up and toss me to the tigers.

“You knew,” she says.

“I had no idea. I didn’t guess. Ididn’tknow. I didn’t even wonder.”

She nods, looking after Sierra and Sylvia. “Well, then, you’ve got a lot of time to make up.”

And she goes around her dad’s car, gets in, starts it up and drives away. I watch until she makes the turn at Big Red and the tail lights disappear.

I’m left with Merrie—and all of my shattered assumptions.

“Are we still good?” she asks and I can’t believe she’s wondering about the diner.

“What difference does it make?”

“It makes all the difference in the world,” she informs me. “I need to know if we’re still on here.”

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