Audrey laughed. “You have no idea what it was like back then. Simon and Cecile were so secretive about Mother. Now, knowing what you’ve told me, it was probably Desmond disappearing that undid Mother—along with Althacazur. I’m sure he didn’t help.”

“Why didn’t either of you tell me that Peter was my father?”

Audrey lowered her sunglasses and met her daughter’s eyes. “I never told Jason. I didn’t see the point—and I still don’t.”

Lara inhaled sharply. Jason Barnes was not her biological father. Worse yet, he didn’t even know it. There were things that Lara had clung to about her identity. That Jason Barnes was her father was one of them. She’d inherited her musical talent from him, she’d thought, but it hadn’t been him at all—it had been Peter Beaumont. Then she remembered the way he’d looked at her as she’d played Peter’s song. Like he’d seen a ghost.

“Are you sure?” Lara, too, sank in her lawn chair. “That he’s my father?”

“Have you ever seen a photo of Peter? I mean everyone always said that he and Jason looked like brothers, but I thought that was a bit of an exaggeration. You look like Peter.”

She’d seen the one photo. The one Jason had shown her when they’d closed on the radio station. Something had pulled her to Peter that day, but she’d thought it was just that he was the focal point of whoever had taken the photo. She’d been wrong. It had been something else, a familiarity.

Audrey stood and began tugging furiously at another patch of bushes, the berries dropping heavily into the bucket.

“It isn’t my place to tell him, but you should,” said Lara.

“I think both Jason and I had tried to move on in our own ways. I believe he knows on some level, but he loved Peter, too. One look at you and I can’t imagine that he doesn’t know the truth,” said Audrey. “It was as though neither of us could continue without him, so you filled the void.”

“Until I couldn’t.”

Audrey turned. “Until it was unfair to ask you to do so. The reality is that Peter would have been a terrible father. I never would have stopped him from going to Los Angeles—it was his dream, but it was never really Jason’s dream. When I told him I was pregnant, he just seemed to find purpose around you. Had Peter lived, things would have turned out much different. I loved Peter, but in the end, you got the better father.”

“But you settled. You said so yourself.”

Audrey was silent, unmoving. “The absence of Peter nearly toppled me. I did the best that I could.”