He set his jaw, suddenly regretting ever opening his mouth.
“Oh no, you don’t,” Mari chided. “You can’t just drop a bomb like that and not see it through. And now you’ve piqued my curiosity, which means I’ll never quit bugging you until you tell me.”
Austin blew out a breath. “Last year was my mother’s forty-ninth birthday…”
“And?”
“And I wanted to do something special for her. She was always saying how she wished our old family photos were better preserved—a lot of them are fading and crumpled and look like shit—so I figured I’d scan a bunch of them and print out new copies, maybe frame some of the good ones.”
He quit talking, hesitant again, but Mari urged him on with a motion of her hand.
Austin let out a breath. “When I was looking through the pictures, I found a few that confused me, a handful of shots of my dad and my older brother. This one summer, when Nate was eight, my dad decided to take him on an adventure. I don’t know what inspired it, since Dad was a selfish asshole who never spent much time with us, but that year he took off with Nate on a four-month cross-country drive, which for some insane reason my mother allowed.”
Pausing again, Austin ran a hand through his hair, feeling as bewildered as he had a year ago. “My mom’s really good at dating the back of every photo, so all the photos from that trip were dated. I scanned them not thinking anything of it—though I do remember Nate mentioning that trip once and saying Dad was drunk the whole time. Anyway, I kept going through pictures, and came across one of my mother when she was pregnant with me. She was nine months pregnant according to the writing on the back, and suddenly something clicked.”
Mari sighed. “The dates didn’t add up, huh?”
“Nope.” His mouth twisted bitterly. “Her picture was dated March, which means I would’ve had to have been conceived at the end of June of the previous year. But my dad and Nate left at the beginning of May and didn’t come back until August. Mom stayed home with Owen and Jake, so I know for a fact that she didn’t have any contact with my father that summer. So unless Baby Me was born two months late or three months early, there was no way I was conceived in June.”
“Did you confront your mother?”
He swallowed the lump in his throat. “Yeah, I did. I figured the dates were a mistake, but I wanted to clear it up anyway. When I asked Mom about it, I knew from the look on her face that it was no mistake.”
Mari made a sympathetic noise. “What did she say?”
“She said she was sorry.” He clenched his teeth. “That she never wanted me to find out, but that maybe it was a good thing I finally knew. Apparently keeping the secret for twenty-four years had weighed on her conscience, and she answered every question I had, including my demand to know who my real dad was. That’s when she dropped the uncle bomb. She and Uncle Rice had had an affair that summer, but according to her, they ended it before my dad came home.”
“Rice? Is that actually his name?”
“Yep.” Austin’s chest tightened with both anger and sorrow. “My brothers and I adored him. My dad was never around, but Rice was. He came to all our football and baseball games, helped us with our homework, he was even the one who gave us the birds-and-the-bees talk.” The bitterness swiftly returned, stinging his throat. “I guess it makes sense that Mom turned to him. He was there for her, too. Gave her a shoulder to lean on whenever my dad cheated on her or stayed out all night drinking.”
Mari gasped. “Your father cheated on her?”
“All the time,” Austin said flatly. “And he didn’t exactly keep it a secret. Everyone in Paradise knew, and to this day a lot of folks still whisper about Henry Bishop and what an asshole he was. They shunned my mom for a while, you know, for being married to such a troublemaker, but these past few years the community has been nicer to her. For some fucked-up reason, she was determined to fit in and be involved in community stuff, even when half the people in Paradise were gossiping behind her back.”
“She sounds like a strong woman.”
His hackles immediately rose. “She lied to me, Mari. She made me believe Henry was my father, when it was Rice all along.”
“Yes, but—” Mari’s tone went cautious, “—don’t you feel a teeny bit better knowing that your real father wasn’t the cheating drunk you grew up with?”
“I’d rather have a cheating drunk for a father than a liar for a mother,” he mumbled.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I trusted her, and she lied to me. For twenty-four years.”
“So now you’ve decided to shun her?”
There was no judgment in Mari’s voice, but it still caused his shoulders to stiffen. “I’m not shunning her. I’m just taking some time to process it.”
“You’ve had a year to process,” she pointed out. “And you said so yourself, you’re avoiding going home.”