“I was ridin’ rodeo at the time. It wouldn’t have worked. Matter of fact, she wasn’t interested. I offered, she said ‘No, thanks,’ told me that she was givin’ the baby up for adoption. Seems as if she lied about that, though. I found out a few years back.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“As I said, I didn’t know it, but she kept the girl. Tiffany’s almost thirty-two now, and . . . well, it’s time she and I met. Especially now that she’s moved back to Bittersweet. Living in the same town, it doesn’t make much sense not to acknowledge that we’re father and daughter.”

“Are you sure? Maybe she’s not interested in meeting you.” Bliss, who had always prided herself on her strength, felt suddenly weary. She was usually a woman who moved easily in business circles, handled herself well at sophisticated and elegant social events, could adjust her style so that she felt as at home in a Seattle high-rise overlooking Puget Sound as she was in a low-slung ranch house that hadn’t seen fresh paint in twenty years. But this—this complete alteration of what she’d grown up believing to be right and true—was more than she could deal with. Nothing in her life had been this mortifying, except maybe her faith in Mason Lafferty all those years ago.

“It’s not so bad,” her father insisted. But then he had no choice but to believe his own words, did he? If what he was saying was the God’s honest truth, then he had to trust that the situation would someway, somehow, work out. His graying brows drew together as if he were confused by the puzzle that was his life.

“Not so bad?” she repeated. “Well, it’s damned unbelievable.” Bliss, raised as an only child had not one, but two half-sisters—grown women she’d never heard of before, never had known existed.

Clearing his throat and squaring his shoulders beneath the thin cotton of his hospital gown, her father mustered up as much bravado as he could. “So now I’m gonna change things. Brynnie and I are gonna get married as soon as the docs tell me I can move back to Bittersweet.” He fingered the edge of his sheet. “I’d like you to come with me, Blissie. Meet Brynnie and your sisters.”

“Meet them?” Boy, her father had really lost it. “Dad, it’s not just that simple. I mean . . . do they want to meet me?”

“Brynnie does.”

“And the others?”

“Don’t know.”

Could she do it? Go back to Bittersweet, a town that held all kinds of bad memories? She felt a familiar ache in her heart—one she’d tried to bury for ten years—and that old, dark pain seared through her. She rubbed her thigh where she still sometimes felt a jab of pain from the accident so many years before. She could only hope that Mason was roasting in his own private hell. “I don’t think so, Dad,” she heard herself saying. “My life’s here, in Seattle.”