“Yes. We’ll be writing a check to Francine every month.”
That would be hell, Reagan decided. The three of them would be entangled in a tight little dance—one that was as awkward as it was painful.
Then she thought of something else. “What about visitation?”
“I’d have to allow that, too. It isn’t the child’s fault. He or she deserves to have a father.”
This was getting worse and worse. “That’s true, but...” Reagan let go of a long sigh. “Wow. If you forgive him, you’ll have to deal with this ‘best friend’ of yours, a person who betrayed you, indefinitely. And you’ll also have to associate with the kid?”
Lorelei lowered her voice even further. “Yes. But if I don’t forgive him, Francine will be the one who’ll have Mark living in her home, helping raise her child. And my child? She’ll be packing her bags each weekend to go stay with him and someone I no longer want her to have any contact with.”
“Me, Mommy? Are you talking about me?” Lucy suddenly piped up.
Reagan bit back a curse.
“No, honey,” Lorelei said. “I was just talking to Aunt Reagan about a friend.”
“Francine?”
Lorelei paused briefly before confirming. “Yes.”
“Are you mad at her?”
“I am,” she admitted.
“Why?”
“Because she’s...made Mommy very sad.”
“How?”
“She took something that belonged to me.”
“Without asking?” Lucy was struggling to understand, but Reagan could tell Lorelei was counting on her inability to do so.
“Yes, without asking.”
Lorelei’s phone began to ring and she snapped it up. “It’s Serenity,” she said. “We have signal at last.”
Reagan listened as Lorelei answered. “I think we’re getting close...No, we can finally use our GPS. Where are you?...Us, too. It’s a mess out...We will. Glad you’re safe...See you soon.”
“What’d she say?” Reagan asked when Lorelei ended the call.
“Apparently, the weather’s even worse coming from the opposite direction, but she just arrived. Wanted to check on us.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Lucy announced.
“Oh, no,” Lorelei muttered.
That explained why Lucy hadn’t finished drifting off to sleep. “What should I do?” Reagan asked. “There’s nowhere to stop.”
Lorelei checked behind her. “Can you hold it, honey? For a little while?”
“No!” Lucy insisted, growing instantly distraught. “I have to go!”
Lorelei cast Reagan a pained look. “Is there any way you could pull over? We’ll have to let her go on the side of the road.”
“We can’t do that,” Reagan said. “It’s too dangerous. We could get hit. Or get stuck in the snow.”
Lorelei spent the next fifteen minutes trying to cajole her daughter, which proved so difficult Reagan was relieved she didn’t plan on having any children of her own.
That effectively ended their conversation about Mark and Francine. But as they drew closer to the cabin, the story about Lorelei’s husband and best friend played over and over in Reagan’s mind, and she began to fear that her involvement with Drew might cost her far more than she’d even realized, including a meaningful relationship with her new sister.
4
serenity
SERENITY STOOD IN front of the wall of photographs at her family’s cabin. She’d seen these pictures so many times she scarcely looked at them anymore. There were several of the lake itself. Tahoe straddled the border between California and Nevada and was the largest alpine lake in North America. Behind only the Great Lakes by volume, and with mountains on every side, it was a popular subject for photographers and painters. She had several representations in her house in Berkeley, purchased mostly from the local vendors and galleries that capitalized on the unique beauty of the area. Emerald Bay was particularly gorgeous. A spectacular shot of it—showing Fannette, the lake’s only island, with touches of snow contrasting with the vivid blue of the water—hung right before her, in the center of everything.
But Serenity was more interested in the many family pictures surrounding it. There was one of her and her three siblings in front of the Christmas tree when they were children, shortly after her parents purchased the cabin. One was of her father holding her in front of him while they sledded down a hill, and there was one of her with her brother, two sisters and mother stretched out on the narrow strip of rocky sand that served as the closest beach, white-capped mountains in the background. The temperature in summer ranged from the low forties to the midseventies, and Serenity remembered that day as being too chilly to get in the water, but it had been warm by Tahoe standards, so there’d been a lot of sunbathers and swimmers who didn’t care.
Normally, Serenity would’ve smiled at the pleasant memories associated with these pictures. She and her family had spent so much time at the lake. The smell of tree sap that hit her the moment she opened the door made her feel as though she’d come home even though she’d grown up in the Bay Area, not far from where she lived now.
But after learning she had two half sisters, neither of whom had ever been mentioned, she couldn’t view these photos with the same blissful ignorance she once had. They looked almost fake to her, staged. And that brought so many questions to mind, as well as a profound sense of loss.
“Damn it,” she muttered, peering closer at a small picture of her parents laughing at a casino on the south side of the lake, from back in the eighties. They’d always been elegant and, thanks to the money they’d inherited from her father’s parents shortly after they married, they’d also been well-to-do—the quintessential, upwardly mobile California couple. Both were in their fifties now, but they hadn’t changed much. Her father was a successful real estate attorney who’d worked in San Francisco’s financial district until they moved to San Diego. Her mother was an organic gardener who sold her produce and flowers to local restaurants looking for “farm to fork” produce. Charlotte had also supported a lot of charities while Serenity was growing up, focused mostly on raising money for cancer research, since Beau had once battled leukemia. Serenity had always considered her parents to be young for their age, hip, open-minded and smart.
So what reason would people like that have to hide the details of her birth? Knowing her parents as well as she did—what they believed in, what they stood for—she felt they would’ve been up front with her if it was simply a matter of being unable to get pregnant. It had to be something else.