“Is Lily—”
“Don’t ask about Lily yet.”
“All right.”
His voice sounded older.
That startled me more than it should have.
“I need to see you.”
Another pause.
Then he gave me an address.
Forty minutes away.
Forty.
For thirteen years, I had imagined him somewhere far enough away to explain his absence.
Another state.
Another country.
Another life.
Instead, he had been less than an hour from the daughter whose childhood he missed.
His house was small and painfully quiet.
No family photographs.
No children’s drawings.
No wedding pictures.
No evidence of a new wife.
Carl opened the door before I knocked twice.
He looked older.
Thinner.
His hair was streaked with gray.
For a moment, I saw the twenty-nine-year-old man I had married beneath the fifty-something stranger standing in front of me.
Then he said the first thing he had apparently spent thirteen years believing.
“Emily got it from me.”
I stared at him.
“She inherited it from you.”
His forehead creased.
“That’s what I said.”
“No. It isn’t.”
He looked away.
“You did not choose your genes.”
“I carried it.”
“Yes.”
“She died because of it.”
“It was connected to what happened to her. That is not the same as saying you killed our daughter.”
