Page 13 of No Quarter

“It’s all right,” she said, patting Valerie’s hand. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter, considering he skipped out on us when we were young, and Mom started to lose her mind.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Valerie sighed. But she didn’t mean that. She had a deep urge to discover whether the man she had always thought of as an absent father was really her father at all.

“Did you see him, then?” Suzie asked, her voice with a slight tremble to it.

Valerie nodded. “I found him after some searching.”

“How is he?”

“He seems good,” Valerie explained. “He says he loves both of us, but it got too much for him with Mom spiraling out of control.”

Now Suzie appeared angry.

“So, he loved us so much that he left us with an unstable parent? I don’t buy it.”

Valerie was torn too. She had a few good memories of her father, but when he left, their mother got worse and ended up having debilitating delusions. Delusions that resulted in her trying to “cut the evil” out of Valerie with a knife. It was hard not to hold him partly responsible.

After that, social services swooped in. There was the court case, and Valerie’s family crumbled. She and Suzie hung onto each other as much as possible, but eventually Suzie was haunted by the trauma.

If their dad had stayed, maybe it would never have gotten that far. She couldn’t help but resent him.

“If I know you, Val,” Suzie said. “You have another move in mind. Some itches you can’t let go. I know how you work. You won’t let this go.”

“I have a DNA sample,” Valerie blurted out with a sigh. “Given I work at the FBI, it’s a simple procedure. But I haven’t sent it in yet. The only thing is there’s … a complication.”

“A complication?” Suzie asked, raising a tired eyebrow.

“Technically,” Valerie explained. “Mom only cast doubt on whether he wasmyfather or not.”

“You think we might have different dads?” Suzie said, sitting up in her chair and looking forlorn.

Valerie held her sister’s hand tightly. “No matter what, we’re sisters. It wouldn’t change anything, you know that, don’t you?”

Suzie nodded. “But if it doesn’t matter, then why do we need to know?”

Valerie didn’t have the heart to tell Suzie the truth. It was more than just wanting to know exactlywhoher father was.

If she didn’t have the same DNA as her sister, then it might give her hope that she wouldn’t end up in a psychiatric ward like most of her family.

She felt ashamed of that thought. But it was the reality.

And there was something else…

“The way Mom was talking about it,” Valerie explained. “There’s something about Dad that she was holding back. I can feel it. I can’t really say more than that. It’s just that I want to be certain there’s nothing in our past that’s going to catch us off-guard.”

Suzie shook her head. “I think we’ve had enough of that sort of thing in our lives, Sis.”

“Agreed.”

“So, Tom, tell me about your work? What sort of thing do you do?” Suzie said, turning from Valerie. Even with her meds, sometimes it was difficult for her to stay on topic for too long.

The conversation blurred into the background for Valerie. She wasn’t focusing on the words that were being said, not completely. She was struck by hownormalit was.

Her husband to be and her little sister chatting about life and the hum drum of everyday routine.

It felt nice.

Valerie had felt self-conscious about how well-balanced Tom’s family seemed in comparison to her own. For the first time in many, many years, she felt as though the possibility of saving her sister from her mental demons was within reach.

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