“You signed the papers. At least, the papers the lawyer came back with had your signature on it. And I picked this great couple. They had a little girl they said was so excited to have a little brother. It seemed perfect. I’d been an only child and I didn’t want my son to grow up that way…”
She was babbling now, her words high pitched and so quick that I could barely keep up with her. I reached across the table and took her hand.
“Who were they? Where do they live?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know much about them. I was only given their first names—Dale and Robin. They lived in upstate New York then, but it was fifteen years ago.”
“Fifteen years?” I shook my head, trying to imagine that I was a father. And that my child was fifteen years old.
It was overwhelming.
I stood up and tossed a handful of bills on the table before walking out. I made it to the corner before I lost what little I’d eaten on the sidewalk.
I was a father. I had a child out there somewhere and someone chose to hide that information from me.
I knew who it was. My father. He’d never wanted me to teach. He’d never wanted me to have a normal life. He groomed me from the time I was a toddler to take over the business, to become the CEO I was now. He had all these grand plans for his children. My brother, Randy, let him down from the very beginning. So he put all his hopes and dreams on me. And his death—if I didn’t know it was impossible, I might suspect he got sick on purpose.
My father did this. He hid my child from me.
If he hadn’t, how different would my life be now?
“You have to go find him,” my sister, Libby, told me a few days later when I poured the whole story out to her. “He’s your kid. You owe it to yourself to know he’s okay.”
And that was exactly what I planned to do.
Chapter 1
Penelope
I rushed into the house, yelling at the top of my lungs.
“JT, get up! We’re late!”
There was no response. But I hadn’t really expected there to be.
JT was my fifteen year old brother. And, since I go to bed at eight o’clock every night because I have to get up at three to make donuts at our family owned bakery, he’s pretty much left to his own devices most night. And he takes advantage of that. He usually stays up until one or two o’clock, watching horror movies and eating everything in the house. The evidence of his late night escapades were scattered around the living room in the form of empty potato chip bags and several dishes with everything from congealed butter and melted cheese stuck to their surfaces.
I gathered dishes as I made my way through the house, dumping them in the sink with aloud clatter.
“JT, seriously,” I muttered as I shoved open the door to his bedroom a minute later.
“Penny, get out!”
I stared at him a second, surprised to see him up and nearly dressed for once. “Sorry,” I mumbled as I backed out of the room.
JT and I had been on our own for three years now, ever since our parents died in a late night car crash on their way home from their weekly date night trip into the city. I had to give up my fledgling career and come home to take care of JT and take over the bakery. It was my mother’s dream, you see, the reason why they moved from New York to this small town in the middle of farm country in Texas. A bakery that served everything from donuts to fancy cakes to simple gingerbread cookies. I worked in the bakery all through high school, but I was determined to have a life in the city, working in anything having to do with art. I was an artist. Not good enough to have some show in a fancy gallery dedicated to my work, but good enough to work in a Fifth Avenue advertising firm. And then the accident and everything changed.
“Hurry up, JT. We have to leave in like five minutes. I have this huge cake I’m supposed to deliver in two hours and we just started on the fondant.”
“I’m right here. You don’t have to yell.”
He brushed past me and burst into the kitchen, searching the pantry for something…Pop Tarts, I suppose. But we didn’t have any. That was another thing I needed to add to my to-do list. Grocery shopping.
“Are you coming to the bakery after school today?”
“I have football practice.”
“After that.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Sean said something about hanging out at his house tonight.”
“Did you do your homework?”
He shrugged again. That seemed to be the only way to communicate with him: reading the subtle messages in his gestures.
I sighed, wondering what kind of trouble he and his best friend, Sean, were getting themselves into every afternoon. I’d heard rumors I didn’t want to believe. It was a very small town, there wasn’t much he could do that I didn’t eventually hear about. But I hoped that some of the rumors—like tagging the neighboring town’s scoreboard the day before the big rivalry football game—weren’t true.