Darkmoon(83)

“Then she got pregnant.”

“Yes. And we were together, and I didn’t see that changing anytime soon. Lawrence hadn’t been all that clear on exactly how everything was supposed to pan out, whether I was supposed to stay with Sonya, be with her to raise our child or what, so I had to wait and see how things developed. We were doing pretty well, until the argument.”

“Yeah, that.” I hooked my thumbs in my belt and shifted my weight to one leg, considering him. My father’s expression was still troubled, although that could have simply been from dredging up memories he would rather have forgotten. “How did she find out? I mean, obviously you kept things secret for a good chunk of time, considering you had that blow-out only a few days before I was born.”

“I got sloppy.” He didn’t exactly sigh, but his lips parted slightly, the slightest gust of breath escaping them. “It was right before Yule, of course, right before the holidays. I did care about your mother, but I’d loved Marie since I was barely fifteen years old. I’d brought a picture of her with me, one I kept hidden in my wallet. Your mother wasn’t the nosy type, so it wasn’t as if she was snooping or anything like that. But I’d pulled out the picture to look at it, wondering what Marie would be doing back in Flagstaff, with the two of us so far apart for the holidays, and your mother walked into the bedroom and saw me holding it. Naturally she wanted to know who it was. I tried to shrug it off, say it was a cousin — which wasn’t even a lie, of course — but she could tell I wasn’t telling the whole truth. Funny how she saw through that one, when I’d managed to convince her I was a Santiago for all those months.”

“So she never knew you were a Wilcox?”

“No. She thought I’d been cheating on her. I tried to explain that I hadn’t seen Marie for almost a year, but she didn’t believe me, said if that were really true, then I wouldn’t be carrying around another woman’s picture. And the more I tried to talk to her, the more upset she got. She didn’t want to listen. It almost felt as if she wanted an excuse to get rid of me.”

“Why would she feel that way?” I asked, sending him an accusing glance. Not that I really suspected him of doing anything worse than lying to her about who he was, but I had a hard time imagining a woman nine months pregnant who’d want to be left alone to have her baby by herself. Then again, my relationship with Connor was very different from whatever it was that my mother and Andre Wilcox had shared. Their entire history together was built on lies. Maybe Connor’s and my relationship had started out that way, but things had changed dramatically for us. I knew he would never lie to me again. I trusted him implicitly.

After a heavy pause, my father said, “I don’t know what she was thinking. Maybe she was tired of being out in California and wanted to go home to her family, and the only way she could think of to do that was without me. I think maybe she was scared about raising a child so far away from the support structure she knew. She did talk about her sister Rachel from time to time, almost as if she wished her sister was around so she could help with the baby and Sonya could get back to what she was best at — partying and having fun.” He stopped himself there, as if he were about to say more but didn’t want to be seen as maligning my mother to my face.

It wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before, though. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “My Aunt Rachel has made it pretty clear what she thought of her my mother’s character flaws. And it’s not as if I’m going to nominate for sainthood someone who went out drinking only a few months after her baby was born and managed to get herself killed because she was riding on the back of a Harley with no helmet.”

“I am very sorry about that,” my father said quietly. “When Lawrence told me what happened, I wanted to go to Jerome, go fetch you and bring you back here, but he said that wasn’t right, that you would be the next prima, and as much as it hurt, I had to leave you to be raised by your McAllister relatives.”

He might have lied to my mother, but I could tell he wasn’t lying now. “And so…you just stayed out here, and took your grandmother’s family name? You never went back to Flagstaff?”

“Never. What I had done needed to be hidden from both the McAllister and Wilcox clans. I did send one note to my mother, so she would know I wasn’t dead…too.” The last word was tacked on, and I could tell how much it still bothered him that he hadn’t been there when his father had passed away, and had to stand by and do nothing while his mother turned her back on that part of her past, repudiating the witch clan her husband had come from.