Under a fan of black lashes, Lennon’s eyes shift to the floor, and he doesn’t lift his face.
Must get out. Now.
Nearly tripping over my own feet, I stride out of the shop and exhale a long breath when I’m back in the sunshine. I can’t get back into the clinic fast enough.
But when I’m settled behind the shield of the front desk, my eyes fix on the envelope the Mackenzies gave me. It’s from a PO Box in San Francisco and is, indeed, clearly addressed to Joy Everhart. Not sure how they missed that, but whatever.
After checking the back hallway and finding it clear, I peek into the envelope.
It’s a piece of paper with a handwritten note and a small book of personal photos. I recognize the photo book’s brand from online ads: upload your photos, and they send you a printed book a few days later. This one says Our Bahamas Trip on the cover in a frilly font.
I open the book to find a million sunny vacation photos. The ocean. The beach. My dad snorkeling. My dad with his arm around some woman in a bikini.
Wait.
What?
Flipping faster, I stare at glossy pages printed with more of the same. Dinner and tropical drinks. My dad smiling that dazzling smile of his. Only he’s not smiling at my mom but some stranger. A stranger with a gold ankle bracelet and long lash extensions. He’s got his arms wrapped around her, and—in one photo—is even kissing her neck.
What is all this? Some fling after my mother died? Someone before Joy? I pull out the letter.
Joy,
You don’t know me, but I thought you’d want to see this, woman to woman. Photos from our vacation last summer.
Good luck,
One of many
My fingers go numb. Last summer? He was here, working at the clinic, last summer. No, wait. There was a week he went to Los Angeles for a massage therapy conference. And came back with a shockingly dark tan . . . that he said he’d gotten after lying out by the hotel pool every afternoon.
“Oh, shit,” I whisper to myself.
My dad is having an affair.
3
It’s all I can think about. That evening, after Mom returns from seeing Grandma Esther in Oakland and lets me borrow her car, I’m sitting inside the Melita Hills Observatory’s dark auditorium for my monthly astronomy club meeting. Sometimes we head up to the roof with our telescopes, but this month, it’s an info-only gathering. And thanks to that Bahamas photo book, I’m paying zero attention to Dr. Viramontes, the retired Berkeley teacher who’s president of our local chapter. He’s addressing the group—a couple dozen people, mostly other retirees and a handful of students my age—while standing at a podium near the controls that turn the ceiling into a light show of the night sky. I lost what he was saying a quarter of an hour back, something about where we were going to be watching the Perseid meteor shower.
Instead, my mind is stuck on that photo of my dad kissing that woman.
He lied to my mom. He lied to me.
And he forced me to lie, telling my mom that the Mackenzies hadn’t received any of our mail, because no way was I handing over that ticking-bomb package of agony over to my mom. Not right now, when she’s full of cheer and sunshine, encouraging me to go on the camping trip with Reagan. Maybe not ever. I don’t know. This will tear our family apart.
I’ve never been in this kind of position, being forced to decide where I should hide photos of my dad two-timing my mom. Or three-timing. Four-timing? What did that woman mean by “one of many”? The photos are from last summer, and I doubt this woman would want to call him out to his wife if she were still seeing him. So when did the affair end, and how many others were there? Are there?
Does he just pick up random acupuncturists from alternative health conventions?
Are they all locals?
Do I know any of them?
Ugh. Considering all the possibilities hurts my brain. And what’s even weirder about the whole thing is that the strange woman in the photos looks a lot like my birth mother. I mean, clearly it’s not her, and this stranger is younger than my mother was when she died, but there’s an uncanny resemblance. And that just freaks me out.
My dad is having an affair with someone who looks like his dead first wife. That’s not normal.
What am I saying? None of this normal, no matter what she looks like. I think of Mom smiling this morning, completely oblivious to the fact that Dad’s cheated on her, and it makes my stomach hurt all over again.
Thank God the normal clinic receptionist came in to take over for me at lunch, because no way could I handle looking my dad in the eye.
My stomach is sick. My heart is sick. Everything about this is wrong, wrong, wrong.
And the cherry on top of this shit sundae is that the Mackenzies know. Sunny and Mac saw what was inside the envelope. They had to. I mean, judging from the awkward way they acted, and all that business about meeting for coffee if we ever needed to talk? It’s hard for me to blame them for looking at the photo book. If they really did open it by accident, I’m sure curiosity got the better of them. It did for me.
Huge mistake.
Oh, God. Does Lennon know too?
“What’s wrong?”
I snap out of my thoughts and realize the meeting has ended. The person speaking to me is a brown-haired girl sitting at my side. I’ve known Avani Desai as long as Lennon and Reagan, when we first bonded over astronomy in seventh-grade science class, both acing a quiz about the planets. Avani and I used to carpool to Reagan’s
