Page 66 of Breathless With Her

I was doing this. I was going to see my dad. This was okay. He would just tell me what happened, and everything would be all right. I wasn’t going to freak out.

The door opened, and a boy of about fourteen with sandy blond hair and a crooked smile looked at me. He was lanky, probably tall for his age, and just learning how to use those long limbs of his.

But I wasn’t really looking at any of that in real detail. No, I was looking at his eyes.

Because those eyes, the shape of them, the color…those weremyeyes.

What were my eyes doing on a fourteen-year-old boy?

Or fifteen, or sixteen. A teenage boy?

I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t do anything. I was looking at someone who had to be related to me. And this was Frank Rose’s house, at least according to the detective.

Horror washed over me. I knew exactly who this was. This was Frank Rose’s son. A son that he’d had with another woman. One he’d kept while he hadn’t kept Jennifer and me.

“Hey, you okay? You look a little pale. Do you want some water?”

The boy spoke quickly, his voice at that stage in puberty where it was just starting to crack, just starting to get a little deep.

He was a teenager.

He had to be my brother.

Right? Or maybe I was just seeing things. Imagining things in order to make sense of it. Maybe he wasn’t related to me at all. Maybe those eyes were just common.

But Jenn’s babies had those eyes, too. And so did my dad.

“Who are you talking to, son?” a deep voice asked from the living room behind the kid. My hands shook, and I clenched them at my sides. “Is it Jessie from next door?” Frank Rose asked as he took a few steps forward.

He put his large hand on his son’s shoulder, gave it a squeeze, and then looked up. His eyes widened ever so slightly, and I wondered what he saw?

Did he see the little girl he had left behind?

No, I didn’t think so. He wouldn’t know what I looked like now. He wouldn’t remember the little girl he had left far too young. He wouldn’t remember the child he had shattered in so many ways. The one that had learned to rely on him, only to learn to depend on no one. Because they all left. Everybody left you broken in the end.

I looked like my mother, though. Other than my eyes and maybe a few gentle slopes of my face, I looked exactly like my mom. Is that what he saw right then? I didn’t know, but he looked at me, an older version of the man I had seen in photos. The father I could barely remember. He knew who I was.

“Hey, Con. Why don’t you go in the back and help your mother, okay? I have to take care of this.”

“Are you okay, Dad? She looks like she needs some water or something. It looks like she saw a ghost. You think we have ghosts?” Con asked, turning into his father’s hold like he didn’t have a care in the world. Like his dad loved him with everything that he had, and nothing was ever wrong or missing in his life.

Why did this kid have that while I didn’t?

Why did it hurt so much?

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it. You go help your mother.”

“No problem, Dad. Nice to meet you, lady.”

He waved at me and then ran off to the back where his mother presumably was. A mother that he had in his life, the woman Frank Rose had stayed with.

“Jenn?” Frank Rose asked, his voice low.

And that was enough for me.

He thought I was my sister.

Because he had done the math and figured it couldn’t be his wife. The one he left. No, it had to be his daughter. But he’d been wrong. I wasn’t Jenn.

---