Chapters (46)
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- seven
- eight
- nine
- ten
- eleven
- twelve
- thirteen
- fourteen
- fifteen
- sixteen
- seventeen
- eighteen
- nineteen
- twenty
- twenty-one
- twenty-two
- twenty-three
- twenty-four
- twenty-five
- twenty-six
- twenty-seven
- twenty-eight
- twenty-nine
- thirty
- thirty-one
- thirty-two
- thirty-three
- thirty-four
- thirty-five
- thirty-six
- thirty-seven
- thirty-eight
- thirty-nine
- forty
- forty-one
- forty-two
She shook her head. “If they are, then you’re looking at someone else in that house. Alastair is a lot of things, but he isn’t a killer.”
“You didn’t want him as the father of your daughter. And that was back when he was, by all accounts, a respectable college student. He got out of town at a damned convenient time. Are you really telling me he didn’t know he was about to be a daddy? Because I’m thinking, for a twenty-year-old guy eager to make something of himself, finding out he got a sixteen-year-old girl pregnant would be plenty of incentive to decide it was time to get the hell out of Columbus and never come back.”
She didn’t answer for a minute. Then she said, “He left before I knew I was pregnant, but I think he suspected it. We’d kept our relationship a secret. His choice. Then I started missing first class every day, sick to my stomach. I wasn’t an A student, but I didn’t skip. It was a teacher who figured out what might be wrong and persuaded me to take a pregnancy test. That was a month after I started missing classes, and three weeks after Alastair gave me the ‘I love you, but I need to grow up, move onto campus, and date girls my own age’ speech.” She gave a wry smile. “As you can tell, he never quite got to that last part.”
“So he left and never looked back. Saved himself a bundle on child support.” I looked her in the eye. “Money you could have used.”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Maybe I should have asked. He’d have paid. I just—I didn’t want to share Ginny with him. I was young and I was hurt and I was stubborn. By the time things started going wrong with Ginny, Alastair was already on his third wife, so I knew there wouldn’t be any money and I couldn’t see how bringing her father into her life would help. I’d go from being the whore who got knocked up by a stranger to the bitch who’d kept her daddy away from her. I decided to stick with my first role. I was used to it.”
“So twenty-five years later Alastair returns to find his ex with a twenty-five-year-old daughter ... and doesn’t connect the dots?”