Julia’s eyes filled with tears.
“I wasn’t expecting him to fix everything,” she whispered. “I just wanted to know if he was really my father. I wanted to meet him.”
Mark reached for her hand.
“And I wanted you to have a chance to know me.”
I watched them together.
The girl who had seemed like a rival in the jewelry store was now sitting in my living room, looking like a frightened child who had been pushed from one home to another.
My anger hadn’t disappeared, but it had become tangled with something else.
I was still hurt that Mark had kept such an enormous secret from me.
Yet I couldn’t look at Julia and blame her for any of it.
She hadn’t asked to be born into a complicated situation. She hadn’t asked to discover her father at sixteen. And she certainly hadn’t asked to become the center of a misunderstanding between two adults.
