Mr. Mercer was propped up between two crutches, his knee buried in the straps and padding of a brace. He smiled ruefully. “You should see the other guy,” he said, wincing.
The ma?tre d’ laughed mirthfully and waved for him to follow her to the dining room. Luckily, the room wasn’t crowded, so Mr. Mercer was able to maneuver easily around the tables. A piano tinkled in the corner, blending in with the low conversations and scrape of silverware. A few men in suits sat at the bar, talking golf, while women in designer dresses and pearls nibbled on colorful salads, the dressing in cups to the sides of their plates. The big floor-to-ceiling windows on the far wall offered a panoramic view of the Catalina Mountains. As they passed a large gilded mirror, Emma studied their side-by-side reflections. She’d inherited Mr. Mercer’s straight nose and jawline. She smiled at her own reflection and saw the matching smile on his face. It seemed so obvious that they were related, now that she knew to look for it.
“What happened?” a woman called out from a nearby table, glancing in concern at Mr. Mercer’s crutches. Mr. Mercer just smiled at her and passed on, but not before Emma noticed that a lot of the women in the dining room were eyeing Mr. Mercer appreciatively.
Ew, were they ogling my dad? Sure, he was good-looking in that salt-and-pepper way, dignified and handsome in his tan sports coat and Italian leather shoes. But he was here with his daughter, for crying out loud—well, really his granddaughter. And he was on crutches.
Emma helped Mr. Mercer into a chair at a large round table in the corner. “I’m so sorry again about your knee,” she mumbled.
He shrugged. “It’s not your fault.”
“It kind of is. If it wasn’t for me …” Emma trailed off, still annoyed at Thayer and Ethan.
But Mr. Mercer waved her protestations away. “Let’s not talk about it anymore, okay?”
A waitress handed them leather-bound menus, and Emma’s mouth started watering just reading her choices: portobello ragout in truffle oil, butter-poached lobster, rosemary-rubbed pork tenderloin, pecan-crusted snapper. Eating in nice restaurants instead of Jack in the Box was definitely on the list of Things That Do Not Suck About Being Sutton Mercer.
But then Emma thought of the killer’s most recent note—YOU SHOULD THANK ME—and suddenly didn’t feel as hungry. The cost of her new life made it hard to enjoy the perks.
When the waitress returned, they put in their orders: fettuccine alfredo for Emma, a filet mignon, rare, for Mr. Mercer. Then Mr. Mercer reached into his coat and pulled out a folded manila envelope. He looked down at it in his hands for a moment. “I found these for you,” he said, setting it on the table between them.
Emma opened it to find a thick pile of photographs. On the top was a glossy picture of Becky around age twelve or thirteen. She was sitting on a horse and grinning broadly, braces glinting on her teeth. The next was of Becky in a Girl Scout uniform, pointing proudly at a merit badge on her sash. Becky in a cat costume for Halloween. Becky on a beach building an elaborate sand castle. There were a few of an older Becky, sixteen or seventeen years old. She’d lost all her baby fat and had a pale, waifish beauty. She no longer smiled for the camera. Emma paused at a picture of her mother in an oversized plaid flannel shirt, standing on a canyon trail in California. The expression on her face was hard to read. Sad, maybe, or just distant.
A wave of sorrow washed over Emma, too. What had happened to that smiling girl on horseback? How had she become the haggard woman she’d seen in the Buick?
It was hard for me to look at them, too. All my life, I’d wondered who my birth mother was. Admittedly, I’d pictured someone amazing: an international reporter called away to cover a dangerous war zone that was no place for a child, or a fashion model working the runways in Paris. But Becky was so ordinary, plain. Damaged.
“There are more in the attic, if you’d like to see them,” Mr. Mercer offered.
“I would,” Emma said, flipping through the photographs again. She paused on a picture of a junior-high-age Becky scowling playfully from a tent, perhaps on a camping trip. “She’s really pretty.”
The Becky she’d known had been beautiful, with her big blue eyes and milky white skin. But there was a brittleness to her, an unease that kept most people at a distance, as though some tangible sadness clung to her. Emma remembered being at a playground once when a man in a basketball jersey had tried to flirt with her mother. Becky had stared silently at him from within the depths of her long, loose hair until he’d moved nervously away.
Mr. Mercer nodded as the waitress set down their appetizers. “She is. She looks a lot like her mother. So do you, for that matter.”