Page 17 of It's One of Us

“Huh?” Park looks up, unseeing for a moment, until his brain clears of whatever he’s writing, and he is able to focus on her again.

“Honey. You’re home,” he says, leaning back so quickly that the chair tips precariously.

“A reporter just called.”

He pushes away from the desk and stands as if to hug her, but she steps back, and his arms hang empty in the air, a parenthesis of confusion, before dropping to his side.

“They’ve been trying my cell, too. I haven’t answered. I don’t know what they want me to say. And I thought you and I should talk first, before I discuss anything with anyone outside the family.”

She crosses her arms on her chest. “All right. Talk. Who is this mysterious mother who’s had your child?”

“I honestly have no idea. I swear. Please, will you just sit down for a minute? You’re making me nervous.”

She blows out a breath and sinks into the chair across from his desk. It is dark brown leather, cracked in multiple places, missing nails along its border, and needs to be replaced. She hates it. He loves it.

Welcome to marriage.

“I need to tell you something,” Park says.

He looks as nervous as he did the night she confronted him about screwing Alison damn Banks the summer after their senior year.

He hands her a file.

“Winterborn Life Sciences? Park, what is this?”

“My second year in grad school, one of the guys from the fraternity who was in medical school reached out to see if I’d be interested in donating sperm.”

She drops the folder on his desk. “You didn’t.”

He rounds the desk and kneels at her feet. “I did.”

She pulls her feet under the chair to stop herself from kicking him in the groin. The rage is bubbling again, just below the surface. She already knows what he is going to say.

“And?”

“And it’s possible there are more children.”

8

THE DAUGHTER

Scarlett Flynn was eight years old when she realized something wasn’t right about her family. To start with, she had no father. All of her friends had fathers. Some had two fathers, an indulgence she couldn’t imagine. All Scarlett had was a mother who worked the night shift at Vanderbilt’s children’s oncology unit, a brother who was five years older and imperious as hell, and a nanny who liked to sneak cigarettes on the back porch and watch R-rated horror movies with the sound down.

As a result, teenage Scarlett hates both horror films and cigarettes, and is wildly jealous of families with fathers.

Your donor.That’s how her mother refers to Scarlett’s father. “Your donor was a college graduate with blond hair and blue eyes and a clean medical family history. What more do you need to know?”

What more?

Does he have a beard? Does he play Frisbee? Does he like dogs? Cheese pizza, or the works?

Did he sire other children?

It was that last thought that drove Scarlett to save up all of her allowance money and buy the DNA kit that you send off to learn your heritage. Not that Peyton isn’t enough; he is a good brother, for the most part, unless teasing her about her first bra or withholding the remote, but Scarlett sensed there was more. She has talents that her mother’s biology can’t explain. She is destined for great things, this she knows in her heart, and finding out who she is? That’s the key to everything.

It doesn’t feel like much to ask, learning who her biological father is. She is proud of her mother, the sacrifices Darby’s made, how she managed to keep both Scarlett and Peyton in private schools and build them substantial college funds. Darby is smart and hardworking and a lovely, fun mom, but intransigent when it comes to answering the real question—why have two kids with a sperm donor? She is pretty. She is smart. She is straight, for all that Scarlett knows, not that it matters one way or another.

And yet, she’d chosen to raise two kids by herself. Siblings. She wanted a boy and a girl, Darby said, and that’s why she’d chosen this route. She wanted children she knew were healthy, and that’s why she had chosen this route. Could you blame her, spending all day with sick kids, that she’d want ones of her own not afflicted?