Colleen stood then, freeing herself from Beckett’s arms. “I believe we have to live life as it is, not as we want it to be. Acceptance, right? Isn’t that what you told me? Isn’t that the way to an honest life?”

“Not everyone chooses an honest life, Colleen. And you can’t blame them. Sometimes the truth is too much to bear. Go easy on your mother and dad.”

Colleen sat again, slumped against him in what felt like defeat. “She changed my story so her story could look and feel better. I don’t feel much like being easy on her right now.”

“Then don’t.” He kissed her forehead and pulled her closer.

“The first Colleen died while giving me life. She died and I never knew she existed. Can it be true that somewhere inside I knew? Because now everything in the past takes on a new light—it makes sense—and it seems like I knew.”

She didn’t know how to explain this to Beckett, but all the times when their mother looked at Hallie with a certain eye and looked at Colleen with another, she’d known. When their mother told Dad that she was trying, my God, she was trying, she’d known. It was a different kind of trying than Colleen could have ever guessed. She wasn’t making some meager attempt to be a good mother. She wasn’t trying to survive motherhood. She was trying to love Colleen, who was the child of another woman.

“Are you okay?” Beckett asked.

“I’m not sure.” Colleen sat and pressed her forehead to his, kissed him and then sat straight. “It wasn’t my fault she couldn’t love me the way she wanted.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not my fault that Mother couldn’t love me as I wanted; it wasn’t my fault that Walter cheated on me.”

“How could it have been?”

“That’s the thing. I always thought there was something wrong with me. Sure, there are loads of things wrong with me, but nothing that would keep a mother or fiancé from loving me. It was their hearts, not mine, that kept them far from me. I represented my dad’s other love. Walter is and always has been a cheater, a liar and a manipulator—I wasn’t so special. Just one in a long line.”

She turned to Beckett as she felt something breaking open inside her chest, a fragile eggshell, flooding her breath with truth. “Do you know how very, very long I’ve tried to figure out what is so stinking wrong that my mother and my fiancé couldn’t love me fully? I’ve made lists. I’ve tried to find the broken part of me that made them turn away from me. I have . . .”