Page 94 of It Happened on the Lake

“Y ou’re the guy from across the lake!” Dawn guessed, opening the door a bit wider so that Levi could step inside. “I saw you through the telescope!”

Oh dear God . Harper wanted to die a thousand deaths. “My daughter,” she said, barely able to get the words out. “Dawn.”

“Levi Hunt.” His gaze didn’t leave Dawn’s.

Dawn was smiling. “I know. Mom said so.”

Slowly Levi’s gaze moved to Harper, and her heart dropped to the floor. He knew. Damn it, he knew. “What else did she say?”

“She said that you went to school together. Were classmates.”

“That’s right.” His eyes narrowed just a fraction, but Harper knew him well enough to realize he was putting two and two together. No doubt he was coming up with three. “So why was I the topic of conversation?”

“Because we saw you. Across the lake. You were outside, near the water,” Dawn answered. “Mom was showing me around, and up in the tower room there is this awesome telescope. I mean it’s freakin’ awesome. I looked through.”

“And it was focused on my house?” he guessed.

“I guess, but really you can see all the houses across the lake.”

“Is that so?” He was staring at Harper, and she felt her jaw tighten.

Dawn was nodding. “Yeah and—”

A sharp beeping sound interrupted her.

“Oh crap!” Dawn made her way across the foyer to her purse, picked it up, scrounged inside, and came up with a black pager.

She checked the message. “Oops. Gotta go.” She looked up at Harper.

“I knew this would happen. It’s Gina. She’s such a flake!

” Dawn rolled her eyes. “Listen, she’s ready to go, and it gets intense with her aunt sometimes.

Like really intense. Anyway, she really wants to see Heathers .

Maybe since it’s an earlier show, I can go with her.

It’s showing just a few blocks from my apartment, the theater by the Fifth Street Market.

Really just around the corner and a couple of streets from where I live, so I could make it.

But then, I really do have to study.” She bit her lip, seemed torn.

“Anyway, I have to go.” She hiked the strap of her purse over her shoulder.

To Levi she said, “Nice to meet you.”

“You, too.”

She hugged Harper and said, “Later, Mom. I’ll call.” With that, she breezed out the door, dashing to her Acura which was wedged between Harper’s Volvo and Levi’s Ford.

“Drive careful,” Harper called after her, just as she had since Dawn had first gotten behind the wheel by herself at sixteen. “Let me know that you got back safe.”

Dawn just lifted a hand and slid into her car.

With Levi standing inches from her physically but miles away emotionally, she watched her daughter back out of the space, then put her little car into drive and speed across the bridge. The lump in her throat was immense.

Levi waited until the Acura had disappeared from sight, then turned to her and said, “Your husband isn’t Dawn’s father.”

The world seemed to go quiet and fall away.

If there were birds chirping nearby, or water lapping on the shore of the lake, or traffic passing on the street past the lane, she didn’t hear any of them over the sound of her own heartbeat.

She started to speak. Then stopped. The lie she’d been forming stuck in her throat. “Ex-husband,” she forced out.

Levi waited, jaw set, lips razor thin, the temperature seeming to have dropped ten degrees.

“No,” she admitted. “Joel isn’t Dawn’s father. I mean, her biological father.”

“Does she know it?”

The question rang like a death knell.

“Dawn?” Harper cleared her throat. “I haven’t told her. But . . . she may have guessed. She’s smart and knows part of my history. But no, I never actually sat down and talked to her.”

A breeze ruffled his hair and chilled her cheeks.

His brown eyes narrowed. “What about your ex? What did you tell him? He had to have known.”

“Of course.”

“So you told him that she was Chase Hunt’s daughter and explained that he was missing and that you needed a father for your kid?”

Close enough , she thought, her throat as dry as desert sand. “Something like that. Yeah.” But she saw the recrimination in his gaze. Her insides froze. Oh dear God. He knows. Her heart was thundering, her pulse pounding in her ears.

“So you lied,” he accused quietly. “Again.”

She closed her eyes for a second, gathering herself for the truth, this moment she had feared and dreaded for nearly two decades. “Yeah,” she finally admitted, nodding. She wanted to look away, to avoid the truth, but as it was being laid bare, she met the condemnation in his gaze.

“You and I took biology together,” he reminded her. “Sophomore year. Mr. Sandgren’s class. We were lab partners.”

“I remember.”

“We studied genetics. Dominant and recessive genes.”

She knew what was coming, could barely breathe.

“You and Chase—both blue eyes,” he pointed out. “Recessive gene. But your daughter?”

“She has brown,” Harper admitted, rubbing her arms to ward off a chill as her world imploded.

All the lies she’d so carefully spun over the years were rapidly unraveling.

It was an out-of-body experience. She felt she could look down and see Levi and her standing in front of the massive house, a fine October mist dampening their hair, cooling their skin, and the truth splintering the ground between them, causing the asphalt to rend and a bottomless abyss to separate them.

“I think you’d better come inside,” she said. She didn’t wait for him to respond, just walked through the open door to the parlor. She’d dreaded this day nearly as much as when she would have to explain the truth to her daughter.

She heard the door shut behind her, then his footfalls as he caught up with her in Gram’s parlor. Levi. Once her childhood playmate. Her trusted friend. Her lover. And the father of her only child. Her heart felt as if it were being squeezed. Hard. “Maybe you’d like a drink,” she suggested.

“Maybe I’d like the truth.”

“Fair enough. But you’re getting a drink anyway.” With quivering fingers, she poured two short glasses of Scotch and handed one to him.

“Dawn looks enough like Chase that everyone who suspected the truth would just assume she was his kid,” Levi guessed, having put the pieces together. “And you didn’t do anything to discourage that.”

She didn’t disagree, just sipped from her drink.

“But they’d be wrong.”

She licked her suddenly dry lips and pushed back on the feeling that the walls were closing in, that her whole world was crumbling. “Yes.”

“Because,” he said, stepping closer, so near that she felt his body heat and saw the differing striations of brown in his eyes, “that girl who just left here is my daughter.”

The lump in her throat was so thick she had trouble swallowing, and there was a burning sensation behind her eyes that she fought with everything she had. She would not break down. Would not !

“Isn’t she?”

“Yes,” she finally admitted.

“Jesus H. Christ, Harper, why?” he asked, anger snapping in his eyes but his words surprisingly calm. “Why did you lie all this time?”

“Why do you think?”

“Because it was easy, the convenient thing to do.”

“Oh right. Easy. Sure,” she threw back. Who was he to judge her?

Taking a sip from her glass, she looked past him, through the windows to the autumn day outside where leaves fluttered in the breeze.

Lights were beginning to burn across the water at the houses on the point.

It’s time , she silently told herself, long past time to open the door to that dark, secretive chapter of her life.

Another sip.

Then she knocked the rest of her drink back and felt the Scotch warm a familiar path down her throat.

Time to pull herself together. What had Gram always said when Harper had been faced with a tough problem and come running to her grandmother for comfort.

There had been hugs and smiles and the wiping away of tears, but there had also been the simple advice: “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, Harper girl.” It seemed to Harper that she’d been doing just that all of her life and sure as hell was going to do it now.

“Sit,” she said. She expected from the hard angle of his chin that he would want to remain standing, but he took a seat in the chair next to the telescope.

She poured herself another drink.

Levi, she saw, hadn’t touched his.

She said, “You remember Christmas break, when we were seniors?”

If possible, his jaw grew even harder. “Yeah.”

“And you and I, we rang in the New Year together?”

Nodding, he set his untouched drink on the side table, his fingers brushing the end of the telescope. “Right.”

“We—?”

“Got drunk and ended up in bed.” It sounded so cold. Heartless. As if it was just a one-night hookup that happened all the time. Which wasn’t the case. But it was the nuts and bolts of it. Just the facts.

Harper felt the heat climb up the back of her neck, but now that she’d started on this truthful journey, there was no turning back.

“Right.” She’d been disappointed and upset when Chase hadn’t shown up to celebrate the new year, a special year when she would graduate and attend college, possibly with him at the university if she decided against Stanford and chose to go to Oregon, where they would be together without the confines of parental restrictions.

And he was bagging out. He’d called and claimed that he needed to stay down in Eugene on that New Year’s Eve, that the term was beginning and he needed to get a jump start on it.

“I’m sorry, Harper,” he’d said from the other end of the line. “But you know that my grades aren’t what they should be and I could lose my scholarship . . . I mean, maybe it’s already too late, I’m already on probation. And if I’m not in school . . . shit, I could end up in the fuckin’ army.”