Page 232 of It Happened on the Lake

“You and Chase—both blue eyes,” he pointed out. “Recessive gene. But your daughter?”

“She has brown,” Harper admitted, rubbing her arms to ward off a chill as her world imploded. All the lies she’d so carefully spun over the years were rapidly unraveling. It was an out-of-body experience. She felt she could look down and see Levi and her standing in front of the massive house, a fine October mist dampening their hair, cooling their skin, and the truth splintering the ground between them, causing the asphalt to rend and a bottomless abyss to separate them.

“I think you’d better come inside,” she said. She didn’t wait for him to respond, just walked through the open door to the parlor. She’d dreaded this day nearly as much as when she would have to explain the truth to her daughter.

She heard the door shut behind her, then his footfalls as he caught up with her in Gram’s parlor. Levi. Once her childhood playmate. Her trusted friend. Her lover. And the father of her only child. Her heart felt as if it were being squeezed. Hard. “Maybe you’d like a drink,” she suggested.

“Maybe I’d like the truth.”

“Fair enough. But you’re getting a drink anyway.” With quivering fingers, she poured two short glasses of Scotch and handed one to him.

“Dawn looks enough like Chase that everyone who suspected the truth would just assume she was his kid,” Levi guessed, having put the pieces together. “And you didn’t do anything to discourage that.”

She didn’t disagree, just sipped from her drink.

“But they’d be wrong.”

She licked her suddenly dry lips and pushed back on the feeling that the walls were closing in, that her whole world was crumbling. “Yes.”

“Because,” he said, stepping closer, so near that she felt his body heat and saw the differing striations of brown in his eyes, “that girl who just left here is my daughter.”

The lump in her throat was so thick she had trouble swallowing, and there was a burning sensation behind her eyes that she fought with everything she had. She would not break down. Wouldnot!

“Isn’t she?”

“Yes,” she finally admitted.

“Jesus H. Christ, Harper, why?” he asked, anger snapping in his eyes but his words surprisingly calm. “Why did you lie all this time?”

“Why do you think?”

“Because it was easy, the convenient thing to do.”

“Oh right. Easy. Sure,” she threw back. Who was he to judge her? Taking a sip from her glass, she looked past him, through the windows to the autumn day outside where leaves fluttered in the breeze. Lights were beginning to burn across the water at the houses on the point.It’s time, she silently told herself, long past time to open the door to that dark, secretive chapter of her life.

Another sip.

Then she knocked the rest of her drink back and felt the Scotch warm a familiar path down her throat. Time to pull herself together. What had Gram always said when Harper had been faced with a tough problem and come running to her grandmother for comfort. There had been hugs and smiles and the wiping away of tears, but there had also been the simple advice: “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, Harper girl.” It seemed to Harper that she’d been doing just that all of her life and sure as hell was going to do it now. “Sit,” she said. She expected from the hard angle of his chin that he would want to remain standing, but he took a seat in the chair next to the telescope.

She poured herself another drink.

Levi, she saw, hadn’t touched his.

She said, “You remember Christmas break, when we were seniors?”

If possible, his jaw grew even harder. “Yeah.”

“And you and I, we rang in the New Year together?”

Nodding, he set his untouched drink on the side table, his fingers brushing the end of the telescope. “Right.”

“We—?”

“Got drunk and ended up in bed.” It sounded so cold. Heartless. As if it was just a one-night hookup that happened all the time. Which wasn’t the case. But it was the nuts and bolts of it. Just the facts.

Harper felt the heat climb up the back of her neck, but now that she’d started on this truthful journey, there was no turning back. “Right.” She’d been disappointed and upset when Chase hadn’t shown up to celebrate the new year, a special year when she would graduate and attend college, possibly with him at the university if she decided against Stanford and chose to go to Oregon, where they would be together without the confines of parental restrictions. And he was bagging out. He’d called and claimed that he needed to stay down in Eugene on that New Year’s Eve, that the term was beginning and he needed to get a jump start on it.

“I’m sorry, Harper,” he’d said from the other end of the line. “But you know that my grades aren’t what they should be and I could lose my scholarship . . . I mean, maybe it’s already too late, I’m already on probation. And if I’m not in school . . . shit, I could end up in the fuckin’ army.”

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