Page 8 of The Hero + Vegas = No Regrets

“I’m sure,” she says.

“Does he know you know?” I ask.

She lets out a cynical laugh. “He’s known since the day I found out. She was pregnant by then.”

“The… mistress? Pregnant?” Oliver asks.

“You have half-siblings,” Mom says. “Two, I think. A boy and a girl.”

“You’re telling us Dad has another wholefamilyin Dayton?” Oliver asks, but Noah stays quiet.

Completely quiet.

“Noah,” I say, my voice laced with suspicion. “Did you know?”

He pulls in a deep breath. “No, I didn’tknow.”

Well, that’s something. At least my brother wasn’t lying to me, too.

“Isuspectedsomething,” he adds. Even though my stomach is on the floor, it drops further.

Mom reaches for Noah’s arm and he pats her hand.

“I saw him once,” Noah says. “In Dayton. Danny’s mom had taken us to a skatepark there while she went to Costco, and he was there, on the other side of the bowl. I was practicing my drop-ins, and there he was.”

Mom lets out a strangled, “Oh god.”

“I knew I shouldn’t have seen it,” Noah says. “He was holding some kid’s hand. A girl, I think. They both had ice creams. I was frozen for… I don’t know how long. Eventually I called out to him and pressed down on my board. But when I got up the other side, he was gone.”

My mom’s hand slips across her lips and she shakes her head.

“Next time I saw him, I expected him to say something but he didn’t. So neither did I. I’ve thought about it for years. Almost asked him about it so many times. Something always stopped me before I could get the words out. Like I knew I’d be breaking the spell if I spoke it out loud.”

My insides pinch. I’m so sad Noah’s had to keep this to himself all these years.

“I had no idea,” Mom says, which totally pisses me off, because it couldn’t have been beyond her imagination that something like this could have happened. Why couldn’t she have been honest? With all of us. With herself.

“Why didn’t you just divorce him?” I spit the words at her like darts.

“And then what?”

“And then you don’t live a lie,” I say. “Then you tell your children the truth.”

Noah squeezes my hand like he knows my anger isn’t anger at all, but deep wounds, raw pain, cuts so deep I don’t know they will ever heal. Every fragment of childhood memory is disintegrating, like someone’s erasing my hard drive. I canfeelthe deletion in my brain. Washing Dad’s car with Oliver and having the world’s best water fight in the middle of it. Family holidays on the lake, where the five of us would pose outside the cabin every year, each picture taking a spot on the hallway windowsill. My parents at my graduation, holding hands, tears in their eyes.

None of it was real.

And now it’s all gone.

THREE

Sophia

As I close my hotel room door, I finally allow myself to drop the fake smile I’ve worn since boarding the plane from New York to Vegas.

There’s no way I can tell my best friend, who is about to start married life, that my father has had a secret second family for the last twenty-five years. No bride wants to hear about a seemingly fairy-tale marriage actually being a total sham. So I’ve been practicing my best fake smiles for the last week—since I learned my parents weren’t who I thought they were. That they are secret keepers. Cover-uppers. Liars.

I don’t know what’s real anymore.

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