Page 6 of The Hampton Beach Café 5
“Yes. My dad left when our mom was pregnant with him... I felt like he deserved answers about his father too, but we kind of got distracted,” Kennedy said, turning and hissing at her brother. “And he's early!”
Linda looked like she was about to cry, but a soft smile played at the corner of her mouth, and Frances felt herself calming down.
“Come sit, William,” she said quietly. “You just look a little like him, you know. It startled me. Much more handsome than he ever was, though.”
As Kennedy and William crossed the room to join them on the couches, Linda poured another cup of coffee and handed it to William.
“What’s going on, Ken? You told me this was a networking opportunity?”
Oh… Kennedy, no,Frances thought as she watched the woman writhe under the scrutiny of three sets of eyes on her.
“I… lied,” she admitted. “You know how we figured out that mom and my dad split because he thought you were… you know, not his?”
Was this how she talked to him about it when he was a kid?Frances wondered.
She was feeling completely taken aback by the lack of tact, but when he replied in an equally calm and collected way, she realized that Kennedy and he had obviously talked about this extensively.
“Yeah? Do we know for sure if it was Mr. Lane?” he asked.
“We do,” Kennedy said. “This is, well,wasMrs. Lane.”
“I changed it back to Price, but you can call me Linda.”
“Oh,” William said, cheeks turning red.
“It’s alright,” Kennedy said, “she’s not surprised. The big surprise is… we have a sister.”
“Well, we hypothesized that it was likely…”
“No, Will, I mean in this room,” Kennedy said quickly.
He turned to look at Frances, his eyes wide.
“Her?”
“Me,” Frances said. “Frances, even.”
“Sorry, that was rude. We’ve spent half my life talking about this, and it’s weird for you to be a real person… Sorry, that was rude again. But... I'm glad to meet you, Frances. I've always wondered if I had other siblings out there. How did we find out?”
Frances looked at him and felt a spark of connection. Despite everything, he was technically family after all. And maybe, just maybe, they could find a way to navigate this strange new reality together––if he and Kennedy wanted to, anyway.
“The thought had never occurred to me even once, until about two weeks ago,” she admitted, “as for how… well, I may have, uh, behaved badly with a DNA sampling kit. We received the results a few days ago.”
“Frances, dear,” her mom said, “could you pop into the kitchen and fetch me the small red photo book from the shelf? I have some photographs of him that William might want to see, and you girls too.”
She rose and moved towards the kitchen to do as she was asked. The fact that her mom was so utterly unfazed by everything happening made her deeply sad.
Seeing her mom sitting with Kennedy and William––two living and breathing results of an extra-marital affair that must have spanned nearly twenty years––Frances realized something that had been staring her in the face her whole life.
Her mom had known.
Maybe not all the details, but the simple fact that she had barely batted an eyelash at any of this proved it. Her throat constricted with the urge to cry. Her mom had married him when she was only nineteen years old, and from the sounds of it, he hadn’t been loyal for a moment.
Until he took the worst approach to a divorce in history––aside from some of the murder-ier monarchs in Europe. Malcolm had never been cruel or disloyal as far as she knew. She had understood for a long time, though, that their relationship was just a state of being. Her unhappiness hadn't even occurred to him.
A feeling Frances had been stewing over for the last few months galvanized almost immediately––she would never again accept unhappiness as a condition of maintaining a relationship.
FOUR
