Then back at my mother.
“What did you just say?”
She didn’t answer.
She was staring at him as though a ghost had walked out of the past and come to collect a debt she had spent decades trying to forget.
Raymond Dawson lowered his eyes to the baby.
“I kept my promise, Linda,” he said quietly. “I never went looking for her. Not once. She came looking for me.”
My throat tightened.
“Our dad was her father,” I said. “Frank Mercer was her father. He taught her to ride a bicycle. He walked her to the bus stop every morning until she was twelve. He was there for everything.”
Ray looked at me.
“Yes, he was. And he was a good father.”
There was no anger in his voice. No jealousy. No attempt to claim the man who had raised my sister was anything less than her dad.
Somehow, that made everything even harder to understand.
