Chapter 2 - My Mother Already Knew Robert’s Face
I did not remain at the reception.
Neither did Robert.
Ethan found us less than five minutes later, after one of the wedding coordinators told him something had happened upstairs. I could barely explain it without hearing how impossible it sounded.
“Robert says he’s my biological father.”
Ethan looked from me to Robert.
Then to his mother.
Diane said immediately, “He is confused.”
Robert’s expression hardened.
“I am not.”
Ethan’s first question was exactly the one mine had been.
“Does that make Claire related to me?”
“No,” Robert said. “Your father was Thomas. Nothing about that has changed.”
That part was straightforward.
Everything else was not.
I called my mother from a quiet study at the opposite end of the estate.
She answered on the first ring.
“Claire?”
“Mom, I need you to tell me who Robert Whitmore is.”
Silence.
Not confusion.
Silence.
“Mom?”
Her voice changed.
“Where are you?”
“At the estate.”
“Are you alone?”
“No.”
Robert stood several feet away. Ethan sat beside me. Diane had been asked to stay out of the room.
I said, “Robert says he’s my father.”
My mother started crying.
I had heard her cry exactly three times in my adult life.
When her sister died.
When I graduated college.
When Ethan proposed and she realized I was leaving the small life we had shared for so long.
This was different.
“I’m sorry.”
I gripped the phone.
“Is he?”
Another silence.
“I believed he might be.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the only answer I had for thirty years.”
Robert closed his eyes.
I asked, “Did you know him?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“We were together.”
The words seemed absurdly normal.
“How long?”
“Almost a year.”
Robert whispered, “Ten months.”
Mom heard him.
Her crying stopped.
“Robert is there?”
“Yes.”
Then, very quietly, she said, “I saw him at your engagement dinner.”
Three months earlier.
The same dinner when Robert had asked whether I had used an ancestry service.
“You recognized him?”
“Immediately.”
“And you said nothing?”
“I panicked.”
I stood.
“You let me keep planning a wedding with his wife’s son.”
“Claire, Ethan is not Robert’s son.”
“You knew that?”
“Yes.”
Of course.
Diane’s first husband was Ethan’s father. Mom had apparently known enough about Diane’s life to understand there was no biological danger.
That made her silence safer.
It did not make it fair.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I didn’t know whether Robert was your father.”
“You just said he might be.”
“There was another possibility.”
That stopped me.
Robert looked at the floor.
My mother continued.
“When I found out I was pregnant, Robert and I had already ended things.”
“Why?”
Another pause.
“Because Diane told me he had chosen her.”
I looked through the glass door toward the hallway.
Diane was standing outside with her arms folded.
“What do you mean, chosen her?”
My mother said, “Robert and Diane were engaged before you were born.”
That was the first piece Robert had not told me.
He had begun seeing my mother during a four-month separation from Diane.
Diane was already a young widow then. Ethan was a toddler. Robert had been part of their social circle for years.
Robert and Diane fought.
Separated.
Robert met Marissa Ellis.
Then Diane came back.
My mother said she did not know Robert and Diane had reconciled until Diane appeared at her apartment herself.
I asked, “What did she say?”
Mom’s voice went flat.
“She said Robert regretted everything.”
Robert looked up sharply.
“She said he wanted his real family back.”
Robert whispered, “I never said that.”
My mother continued.
“She said if I had any dignity, I would disappear before I destroyed a little boy’s home.”
Ethan had been three.
Diane had used her own child as the moral argument.
Then Mom said something worse.
“Two weeks later I discovered I was pregnant.”
I looked toward Diane again.
“Did you tell Robert?”
“I tried.”
“How?”
“I wrote to him.”
Robert said, “I never received anything.”
Mom answered immediately.
“I know that now.”
My stomach tightened.
“How do you know?”
“Because Diane came back.”
This time she already knew about the pregnancy.
And according to my mother, she brought a reply supposedly from Robert.
May you like
A reply Robert said he had never written.
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