“She asked him for money, and I didn’t realize until it was too late how hard that must have been for her. The next thing I knew, one weekend a month, I was leaving our tiny apartment and getting dropped off in front of the gates to my father’s house. My mom was never allowed inside.

“It’s embarrassing how excited I was about it,” she confessed, still smarting at the memory of the audacity of her childlike hope. “I was finally getting a dad. And bonus, he came with a sister for me. I didn’t know that I should be anything but excited to get what I’d wanted for so long. My mom drove me to his house. It was a twenty-two-room mansion overlooking Puget Sound. He had staff. A housekeeper, a cook, a driver. And he had a wife and daughter.”

She could still feel the cold disinterest from the stranger who was her father. Still feel the sharp rejection when the stranger’s wife told her there was no room at her table for the daughter of a whore. She’d stood there in the Italian marble foyer, and her father left her there to chase after his wife.

“His wife hated the idea of my existence. Understandably. Their daughter, Dayana, had no interest in getting to know me. My father had no idea what to do with a surprise daughter.”

Silas held her neck with one warm hand while the other stroked up and down her back.

“I hated going there. I’d lock myself in the guest room and read, watching the clock and hoping time would go faster. At the time, I didn’t understand why my mother would have put me in that position. I begged her to let me stay home, and every time she made me get in the car, I told her I hated her.”

“Twelve,” he reminded her. “You were twelve.”

“It doesn’t mean it was right. I cringe now, thinking about the pain I inflicted on her just because I was hurting.”

To this day, she was ashamed. Worse, she didn’t have the opportunity to make up for it.

“After a while, he started to make an effort. But I know his wife punished him for it. There was a workshop in a separate garage on the property. That’s how he’d work through his problems. He’d blast eighties rock and tinker. He’d let me sit on a stool in the corner while he built something. Then he started showing me how to sink a screw or sand down a rough edge. Once, when his company was facing a down quarter, I helped him build a bookcase. I still remember the smell of the stain. We finished it, stood it up in that garage, and admired it together.”