“Why did she never tell me?” I ask. “She divorced Dad. She could have told me then. Did you ask her not to?”

“Absolutely not. I wanted her to tell you. I begged her—” He stops short.

“Then why didn’t she?” I cry with a resurgence of the emotions I had felt so often since my mother’s death. She didn’t know she would die so young. But I was a grown-up. I had a baby of my own. I deserved to know the truth. “Didn’t she trust me?”

“It was Tom she didn’t trust,” Paul says. “She didn’t know what he would do if word got back to him.” He pauses, pained. “How can I say things like this today?”

“How can you not?” I fire back. “He’s gone. She’s gone. We are not.”

He considers that. “True. And you’re right to be upset with Eleanor, but you have to understand. She worried he would destroy me, or destroy you. Tom could be vindictive. There was this lawyer—”

“Newcombe,” I say, remembering the name well. I remember my father’s vitriolic comments at dinner, when he got so caught up in ranting to Mom that he forgot we girls were there. “He accused Tom of accepting a bribe in exchange for giving a defendant a light sentence.”

“Tom got him disbarred.”

“Rightly so?” I ask. I can’t say that I always wondered. My father’s venom was so lethal that I had to believe his version.

Paul releases a small breath. “I can’t say.”

“Won’t say.”

He fixes me with a look of gentle chiding. “It’s not my place, Mallory. Tom isn’t here to defend himself. I just ask that you understand why your mother did what she did.”

Or didn’t do what she didn’t do, I think and suddenly picture Chrissie’s guilty face. These were all sins of omission. And Paul? I’m not yet ready to rationalize his fault.

“How do I know you don’t just want this to be true? You never had kids of your own, so maybe you want to think I’m it?” Before he can say DNA test again, I rush on. I’m being irrational. But the whole situation feels irrational. “How do I know you aren’t just the last man standing?”

His words are low but firm. “Because I know things another person wouldn’t know. I saw things another person wouldn’t see.”

“Like?”

“A birthmark.”