Page 43 of All In Good Time

“I’m your father’s sister. Richard is my brother.”

Richard. She hadn’t heard that name since she was seven years old. The last memory she even had of her father was of him walking away. She couldn’t recall his face, only the back of his head. As for his family, she never even heard of them.

A lump grew in her throat, which made it difficult for her to swallow comfortably before she answered the woman. “I don’t have a father.”

“He wanted me to call you.”

Becca had long ago accepted that her father would never return, and she’d stopped waiting. Now, she was just angry. A spark lit in her, and she couldn’t help lighting a fire on this woman she had never heard of before.

“He had ten years to call me himself. I’m not interested in hearing anything now. Goodbye.” Becca pulled the phone away from her ear, intent on slamming it down on the receiver.

“Wait! Please wait.”

The desperation in the woman’s voice stopped her, and a war between the seven-year-old and the seventeen-year-old made it hard to hang up and pretend she had never gotten a call.

She pulled the phone back to her ear hesitantly. She didn’t want her father back, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to hear a little from him. What changed so suddenly for him to want to talk to her?

“What?”

“He wanted me to call you and tell you he misses and loves you. He’s very sorry.”

Tears welled in her eyes, hot and angry. “He couldn’t tell me himself?”

Shelby was quiet, and Becca waited patiently for her father’s excuse to come from this woman’s mouth. “I’m sorry for having to be the one to tell you this. Richard passed away the other day. This was just the last thing he wanted me to do.”

Static replaced the sound of the phone, and filled Becca’s entire body from head to toe. One minute she was tethered to the phone, the next she was floating. Barely registering the rest of what Shelby was saying.

From what she could hear, it was all excuses. Excuse after excuse after excuse.

Her father was dead. But it wasn’t for ten years, or five, or one. It was for a couple days.

“I’m so sorry,” Shelby said, and Becca could finally picture her dad’s face. She had gotten her eyes from her dad, and his smile.

But that was all memory. Distorted by the crushing weight of time.

The dad in her mind was not the man Shelby was calling about.Thatman had died ten years ago—this was just time catching up with her memory.

“Whether he loved me or not, he should have told me himself. He had ten years to do it.”

Becca slammed the phone down and cut off anything else Shelby might try to say—if she even tried responding. Becca didn’t care.

The phone sat silent on the receiver. She half expected Shelby to try and call back, but it stayed still and silent. Shelby had done what she was asked and nothing more. Now it was Becca’s turn to deal with the consequences and she had no idea what to do.

What was the appropriate reaction to finding out the father you hadn’t seen in ten years was dead? That he loved you enough to tell youafter he was deadbut not enough to do it while he was alive?

She wasn’t sure. But she picked up the phone anyway, and dialed the number her mom had given her for her boarding house. She tried that number five times. None of them went through and the sky was starting to crush her.

Only one other person popped into her head, and she dialed the newest number she’d memorized.

It rang twice before it was answered, an older man’s voice. “Hello?”

Not Jennifer, not Mal, not Derek. Mark.

If she didn’t feel so numb, she might have been afraid.

“May I speak to Derek?”

“Who’s this?”

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