Guilt? About cheating on Tom Aldiss? But what about me? If I am Paul’s biological daughter, what about me? It’d be one thing if my biological father was the gardener or the electrician or the goddamned roofer. I’d expect any one of those to cut and run. But Paul? Mr. Kindness? Mr. Caring? Mr. Responsibility? I would have expected more of him. And our talk on the front steps on Monday? I specifically asked him about all this!

In a heartbeat, I’m furious about silence and evasion and secrets, about all that went on that I knew nothing of, all that might have helped me growing up under Tom Aldiss’s critical eye. Angrily, I say, “You watched me all those years, thinking I was your daughter? Did you not know how miserable I was—how I felt there was something wrong with me that my father treated me the way he did?”

“I knew,” he admits in defeat and, sensing my upset, pushes up from the wall. I’m not sure if he wants to protect me, belatedly, with his height—or use it to protect himself.

“And you did nothing?” I ask.

“What would you have had me do?”

“Tell me,” I say, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

Paul is suddenly as intense as I am. “And put a wedge between you and your sisters? And risk you resenting your mother—or blurting the truth to Tom at some point, which might have caused him to treat you worse or even disown you?”

“Or break up the law firm?” I add, because I’m not ready to see him as an icon of altruism. There were selfish reasons for what he—what they did. “Didn’t you feel like a fraud?”

“Every blessed day,” he says with vehemence. “But what would you have had me do, Mallory? What?”

I don’t know. Still, my anger remains. I am angry at the situation, at all those lost years, maybe even at the awkwardness I feel now, which I never before felt with Paul. I can’t process the fact that he is my biological father—am so not in control of my feelings that I resent him for that, too.

“What if you aren’t?” I ask. I know I sound spiteful, even infantile, but that’s what anger does. When he looks confused, I say, “What if you aren’t my father after all? What if Tom was the only one with my mother during the time she conceived?”

“They were going through a rough patch for months before and after. They didn’t have sex.”

“She said.”

“I’ll happily take a DNA test.”

I think of that scrap of gauze. It would tell me if Tom and I match but, if not, it wouldn’t tell me who does. “What if she was with someone other than you?”

“DNA test,” he repeats.