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“When did you find out?” she asked.
“The same night I came and told you I was leaving. The night I asked you to go with me.”
She frowned. “How did you find out?”
“When I got home that evening they were in the middle of a fight. Mom was crying hysterically, and Dad was throwing my clothes down the stairs.”
“Your clothes? Why in the world would he do that?”
He sighed. “That’s pretty much what I wondered, too. I asked him what the hell was going on, and he looked at me with such hate I was stunned. I asked Mom what was going on, and she just kept crying, saying something about secrets.”
Nola could feel the tension in his body and tightened her grip on his hand for moral support.
“I started picking up my clothes and went to take them back upstairs when Dad met me halfway up, doubled up his fist and cold-cocked me. I fell backward down the stairs with the clothes in my hands, and Mom went ballistic. I thought they’d both lost their minds. They were screaming at each other again, like I wasn’t even there, but I got the drift. It was hard to miss. Dad was screaming, ‘He’s not my son, and I don’t want him under this roof!’”
Nola gasped. “He said you weren’t his son? But what—”
“That’s what he kept saying. Then Mom told him if he threw me out, she was leaving, too. He said he didn’t want her to leave, that he would forgive her. And her last words to him were that she would never forgive him for what he’d just done to me.”
Nola felt sick to her stomach. “And you came to me, and I rejected you, too.”
Tate sighed. “That’s what it felt like at the time, but once I calmed down, I realized how crazy I must have sounded. I didn’t know what to tell you, because Mom wouldn’t explain, and Dad just kept shouting, ‘He’s not my son!’ If Mom had an affair and I was the result, I didn’t know how to tell you without giving away a secret that was hers alone to tell. It wasn’t until Mom and I were on our own that I figured most of it out, then guessed the rest.”
“Guessed what? Who your real father was? What?”
Tate’s smile was as cold as the expression in his eyes.
“Oh, Don Benton is my father, he just doesn’t know it. Whatever Mom said that led him to believe he wasn’t, it came from one of her earliest hallucinations. Whatever she was rambling about that set him off, it wasn’t real. And he was in such denial over her diagnosis that he wouldn’t ever have considered that what she was saying might not have been true.”
Nola nodded. “I see what you mean. Like, who would willingly lie about having an affair when it didn’t happen?”
“Exactly, and to satisfy myself, I had a DNA test to prove it.”
“But how did you get a sample? Weren’t you already gone?”
He nodded. “It was actually Mom who furnished the sample and she didn’t even know it. The night she packed, she was throwing things into bags and accidentally took Dad’s hairbrushes instead of her own. I submitted my DNA and the hairbrush to a laboratory. It came back 99.99% positive that he was my father.”
“And you didn’t want to confront him with the truth?”
“No.”
“But why, Tate?”
“After what he’d done, I no longer wanted him.”
“I’m stunned! I’m hurt you didn’t trust me enough to tell me and so sorry for you all at the same time.”
“I handled it badly, but all I can say is that I was in shock. I kept thinking I needed to get away to survive it, and naively, I just assumed you would go. When you began pushing me for answers, I didn’t even know how to begin explaining.”
Nola got to her knees, then put her good arm around his neck and laid her head on his shoulder.
Tate wrapped his arms around her without saying a word, and before he knew it, he was crying.
She crawled into his lap and held him tighter.
* * *
After last night’s chaos, Laura Doyle was still trying to put the bits and pieces of their rescue center back in order. They had just finished serving breakfast, and during the meal she had explained the basics of what had happened. Everyone had been sympathetic to Nola Landry’s plight and stunned by Bell’s arrest, but at the same time concerned she would come back and put their families at risk. Once they learned that she was gone, the mood shifted and a new calm began to spread.