by Brenda Novak
“If he’s vindictive enough to fire you because you won’t sleep with him—especially when he’s already married—he’s an asshole, and you need to get away from him as soon as possible, no matter what it costs,” Lorelei blurted out.
Lucy gasped. “Mommy, did you say asshole?”
Lorelei squeezed her forehead. “No, I said... I said...”
“She said, ‘He’s on the last hole.’”
Small point for Reagan for jumping in to help, even though Lucy wouldn’t understand the golf reference. Lorelei was about to mouth a polite thank you but what Reagan said next quelled the impulse.
“Your saintly mother would never use such language.”
“What’s saintly?” Lucy asked.
Reagan had spoken in a sulky mumble, but that hadn’t stopped Lorelei’s bright daughter from picking up on every word.
When no one answered, Lucy seemed to catch on that it hadn’t been meant as a compliment. “Mommy, are you and Aunt Reagan having a fight?”
Lorelei held the strap of her seat belt away from her body so she could glance back to reassure her daughter. “No, honey. We’re just...tired. We all had a long flight today, right? Aren’t you tired?”
“No,” Lucy said immediately.
Drawing a deep breath, Lorelei faced forward. “Well, I am.”
“Now you regret coming,” Reagan said. “I can tell.”
“I don’t regret it,” Lorelei lied, but she was hoping Serenity wouldn’t be the terrible disappointment Reagan was turning out to be. She’d committed to staying for an entire week, and it wouldn’t be easy to leave sooner, not unless she was willing to spend a lot of extra money on two last-minute plane tickets.
Actually, that wasn’t even an option. There was hardly any money in the bank account she shared with Mark, and her credit card was maxed out from their recent kitchen remodel. He’d started paying the bills from a separate account, and she thought she could guess why. He was trying to protect his assets in the event that she left him.
If that happened, until the court divided their property and ordered him to pay child support, which could be months away, she’d be left with little or nothing.
Just in case the worst did happen, she’d have to be very careful when it came to expenses.
Which meant she and Lucy were stuck in Tahoe until her return flight.
3
reagan
REAGAN MENTALLY KICKED herself as she continued to fight through the storm and the traffic to reach the cabin. What had she been thinking? She’d known better than to announce she was the other woman in a romantic triangle. That was the quickest way to destroy her credibility as a decent person, the quickest way to be shunned. Poor Lorelei hadn’t even had a chance to get to know her first.
Good job making sure your half sister never has any respect for you, she told herself. But she was lugging around so much guilt even she didn’t feel she deserved respect. And holding back that information would make her feel dishonest on top of everything else. She wasn’t a liar, wasn’t one to pretend she had any claim on the man she was seeing if she didn’t, especially to people she was hoping to have a lifelong relationship with. What was the point of coming here to meet her sisters if she was only hiding who she really was?
Truth be told, she was probably also looking for someone who’d understand, who’d believe she hadn’t meant for anything like that to happen. She’d felt exactly as Lorelei did—a married man was simply off-limits. But somehow Drew had worked his way through her defenses. She still wasn’t sure how.
“What, you’ve never done anything you regret?” she asked Lorelei. She couldn’t keep the accusing tone from her voice, although she knew she was the one in the wrong, that Lorelei had every right to think the worst.
“Nothing like that,” Lorelei responded.
“Your situation is vastly different from mine. Your husband is probably the only man you see on a daily basis.” It was a weak defense, something she’d already pointed out, but it was the best she could muster.
“I wish you’d quit painting me as being so insulated and out of touch with the rest of the world. I have neighbors, male friends and associates. I could find someone to...to—” she checked her daughter to see if she was paying attention before finishing with a euphemistic “—be with if I wanted to.”
No doubt Lorelei assumed Reagan had been having sex with Drew on a regular basis. But they’d only been together—like that—once. A week ago they’d been working late when the feelings they had for each other had somehow boiled over.
Reagan had been devastated afterward. She’d worked from home the next few days, so she wouldn’t have to see him before leaving on this trip. Because she cared about Drew, because she wanted him more than anyone she’d ever known, she knew she had to stay away until she could overcome her emotions or it would only happen again.
“Except that you’re deeply in love with your husband. Why would you want to?” she asked Lorelei. “You’ve told me how wonderful Mark is. Not all of us are as lucky as you.”
“Yeah, I’m lucky, all right,” she snapped. “About as lucky as Drew’s wife.”
Reagan felt her eyebrows jerk together. “What are you talking about?”
She pinched the bridge of her nose before dropping her hand. “Nothing.”
“Tell me,” Reagan insisted.
Lorelei twisted around to look at her daughter again. “I can’t. Not right now.”
“What, Mommy?” Lucy said.
She faced front. “Nothing, honey.”
Reagan studied her new sister as much as driving through this terrible weather would allow. “Is something going on between the two of you?”
She nodded.
“Since when?”
“Two weeks, six days and—” she screwed up her face as though struggling to get the timing correct “—three hours ago.”
“Don’t tell me he’s seeing someone else...”
Once more, she glanced back at her daughter, but she must’ve felt Lucy was no longer paying attention because Lorelei nodded.
“You’re kidding me!”
“I wish I was,” she said bitterly.
A sign listing the mileage to Incline Village came up on the right, but the numbers were partially covered with snow. Reagan hoped they were getting close. “Let me guess, it was someone at his work.”
Lorelei shot her a sullen glance. “No.”
“A neighbor?”
“Worse.”
“What could be worse than that?”
“My best friend would be worse.”
Reagan gaped at her.
“She’s my ex-best friend now, of course.”
No wonder Lorelei had reacted so badly when Reagan confessed her own situation. “I’m sorry.”
Lorelei said nothing.
“How did you find out?” Reagan asked.
“He told me.”
“Right when we were planning this trip?”
“Just after.”
Reagan’s phone chimed, but she ignored it. She was pretty sure it would be Drew. He was dying to get hold of her, had called and messaged her many times since that night in his office. “I’m surprised you still came.”
“I had to come. I felt like I was suffocating in that house with him.”
Lowering her voice, Reagan tried to choose her words carefully. “Did you have any clue something like that might be going on?”
“None.”
“I see.” She used the rearview mirror to check on Lucy. Lorelei’s daughter seemed completely preoccupied with her sucker, but Reagan turned up the music, just in case. “Are you going to stay with him?”
“I don’t know. He claims he’s sorry. Is begging me not to leave.”
Doubt concerning a man she’d never even met made Reagan hes
itate. “Do you believe he’ll be true to you in the future?”
Lorelei raked her fingers through her long, dark hair. “I don’t know anymore. I don’t seem to have any confidence in a love I would’ve staked my life on less than a month ago. But I have a child to think about. And I’m not sure I want to step out of the way so my best friend can replace me. I’m not even sure I’d be able to make a living on my own. As you’ve already pointed out, I’ve been out of the job market for six years, ever since we moved to the house we’re living in now. Who’ll hire me?”
Reagan cringed. “Sounds like you need to get that so-called best friend out of your lives. Start there. Then maybe you’ll have a chance of repairing your relationship and...and putting it all behind you.”
“I wish we could get her out of our lives,” she said.
The wipers could barely keep up with the snow. The rhythmic swishing, the long day and being strapped into the car seat Lorelei had carried all the way from Florida seemed to be putting Lucy to sleep, which came as a relief to Reagan. The sucker had fallen against her shirt and would probably stick there, but at least she wouldn’t start crying again. “Why can’t you?” Reagan asked. “You don’t owe her anything.”
Lorelei caught her eye and mouthed, “She’s pregnant.”
Reagan felt her jaw drop. “Oh, my God.”
Lorelei said nothing.
“Is she going to have the child?” Reagan whispered.
“Says she is,” Lorelei replied.
“And she’s going to keep it?”
“Of course. Because then she’ll have exactly what she wanted—a claim on my husband.”
“He’ll be financially responsible for the care of the child, you mean.”
“Yes. We’ll be writing a check to Francine every month.”
That would be hell, Reagan decided. The three of them would be entangled in a tight little dance—one that was as awkward as it was painful.
Then she thought of something else. “What about visitation?”
“I’d have to allow that, too. It isn’t the child’s fault. He or she deserves to have a father.”
This was getting worse and worse. “That’s true, but...” Reagan let go of a long sigh. “Wow. If you forgive him, you’ll have to deal with this ‘best friend’ of yours, a person who betrayed you, indefinitely. And you’ll also have to associate with the kid?”
Lorelei lowered her voice even further. “Yes. But if I don’t forgive him, Francine will be the one who’ll have Mark living in her home, helping raise her child. And my child? She’ll be packing her bags each weekend to go stay with him and someone I no longer want her to have any contact with.”
“Me, Mommy? Are you talking about me?” Lucy suddenly piped up.
Reagan bit back a curse.
“No, honey,” Lorelei said. “I was just talking to Aunt Reagan about a friend.”
“Francine?”
Lorelei paused briefly before confirming. “Yes.”
“Are you mad at her?”
“I am,” she admitted.
“Why?”
“Because she’s...made Mommy very sad.”
“How?”
“She took something that belonged to me.”
“Without asking?” Lucy was struggling to understand, but Reagan could tell Lorelei was counting on her inability to do so.
“Yes, without asking.”
Lorelei’s phone began to ring and she snapped it up. “It’s Serenity,” she said. “We have signal at last.”
Reagan listened as Lorelei answered. “I think we’re getting close...No, we can finally use our GPS. Where are you?...Us, too. It’s a mess out...We will. Glad you’re safe...See you soon.”
“What’d she say?” Reagan asked when Lorelei ended the call.
“Apparently, the weather’s even worse coming from the opposite direction, but she just arrived. Wanted to check on us.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Lucy announced.
“Oh, no,” Lorelei muttered.
That explained why Lucy hadn’t finished drifting off to sleep. “What should I do?” Reagan asked. “There’s nowhere to stop.”
Lorelei checked behind her. “Can you hold it, honey? For a little while?”
“No!” Lucy insisted, growing instantly distraught. “I have to go!”
Lorelei cast Reagan a pained look. “Is there any way you could pull over? We’ll have to let her go on the side of the road.”
“We can’t do that,” Reagan said. “It’s too dangerous. We could get hit. Or get stuck in the snow.”
Lorelei spent the next fifteen minutes trying to cajole her daughter, which proved so difficult Reagan was relieved she didn’t plan on having any children of her own.
That effectively ended their conversation about Mark and Francine. But as they drew closer to the cabin, the story about Lorelei’s husband and best friend played over and over in Reagan’s mind, and she began to fear that her involvement with Drew might cost her far more than she’d even realized, including a meaningful relationship with her new sister.
4
serenity
SERENITY STOOD IN front of the wall of photographs at her family’s cabin. She’d seen these pictures so many times she scarcely looked at them anymore. There were several of the lake itself. Tahoe straddled the border between California and Nevada and was the largest alpine lake in North America. Behind only the Great Lakes by volume, and with mountains on every side, it was a popular subject for photographers and painters. She had several representations in her house in Berkeley, purchased mostly from the local vendors and galleries that capitalized on the unique beauty of the area. Emerald Bay was particularly gorgeous. A spectacular shot of it—showing Fannette, the lake’s only island, with touches of snow contrasting with the vivid blue of the water—hung right before her, in the center of everything.
But Serenity was more interested in the many family pictures surrounding it. There was one of her and her three siblings in front of the Christmas tree when they were children, shortly after her parents purchased the cabin. One was of her father holding her in front of him while they sledded down a hill, and there was one of her with her brother, two sisters and mother stretched out on the narrow strip of rocky sand that served as the closest beach, white-capped mountains in the background. The temperature in summer ranged from the low forties to the midseventies, and Serenity remembered that day as being too chilly to get in the water, but it had been warm by Tahoe standards, so there’d been a lot of sunbathers and swimmers who didn’t care.
Normally, Serenity would’ve smiled at the pleasant memories associated with these pictures. She and her family had spent so much time at the lake. The smell of tree sap that hit her the moment she opened the door made her feel as though she’d come home even though she’d grown up in the Bay Area, not far from where she lived now.
But after learning she had two half sisters, neither of whom had ever been mentioned, she couldn’t view these photos with the same blissful ignorance she once had. They looked almost fake to her, staged. And that brought so many questions to mind, as well as a profound sense of loss.
“Damn it,” she muttered, peering closer at a small picture of her parents laughing at a casino on the south side of the lake, from back in the eighties. They’d always been elegant and, thanks to the money they’d inherited from her father’s parents shortly after they married, they’d also been well-to-do—the quintessential, upwardly mobile California couple. Both were in their fifties now, but they hadn’t changed much. Her father was a successful real estate attorney who’d worked in San Francisco’s financial district until they moved to San Diego. Her mother was an organic gardener who sold her produce and flowers to local restaurants looking for “farm to fork” produce. Charlotte had also supported a lot of charities while Serenity was growing up, fo
cused mostly on raising money for cancer research, since Beau had once battled leukemia. Serenity had always considered her parents to be young for their age, hip, open-minded and smart.
So what reason would people like that have to hide the details of her birth? Knowing her parents as well as she did—what they believed in, what they stood for—she felt they would’ve been up front with her if it was simply a matter of being unable to get pregnant. It had to be something else.
“What happened back then?” she asked their still images. “Why do I have two half sisters you’ve never mentioned or acknowledged? And why did I have to find out about them the way I did?”
She nibbled at her bottom lip as she tried to remember any telltale signs—whispering, the sense that her parents were holding back or hiding something important, any strangers in her life—from when she was a child. She’d been racking her brain ever since she’d learned about Reagan and Lorelei, but she couldn’t come up with a single thing that seemed odd or unusual.
Maybe her parents were superior actors. Or they’d simply forgotten anything they didn’t care to remember, put it behind them and moved on. After all, when she was born there’d been no internet, no smartphones, no DNA companies like 23andMe. Her parents probably never dreamed that technology would eventually reveal what they’d hidden, even if they both kept their mouths shut.
That was another thing. Were they both in on the secret? Had they made a pact between them? Or was it something only one knew and the other might not be pleased to find out?
There were so many possibilities. Maybe she wasn’t related to either one of them. But if she was adopted, where did she come from and how did she wind up in their family?
The sound of a car outside sent a prickle down Serenity’s spine. When the engine went off, she cast a final glance at the photos of her parents and the siblings she’d grown up with and squared her shoulders. This was the point of no return. By welcoming Reagan, Lorelei and Lucy into her life, she could wreck relationships that were dearer to her than any others, especially because she was doing it without consulting her parents.
