“Why is your wife terrified of me just because I look like my mother?”
He eyed me as if I was the strange one. “You do not just look like your mother.” Moving to the fireplace, he pulled down a white sheet that covered a portrait above it. “Girl, you could be her.”
The woman in the picture was frozen in time, leaning against a grand piano. She must have been painted decades ago, but she could be me standing here today. The long blonde hair, the almond shape of her eyes, the tall and elegant form, and the alabaster skin that would never quite tan.
The similarity was so uncanny, goose bumps rose on my arms. She’d looked just like me, yet I didn’t know the simplest things about her. I stared at the portrait until the burn in my heart and the backs of my eyes faded.
“She was a sight, I’ll tell you that.” He rubbed his chin. “But beauty like that is a blessing and a curse . . .” His eyes settled on mine, something heavy and resigned filling them. “It always ends up in the wrong hands.”
A sense of foreboding trailed down my spine. My overactive imagination cast a scene through my head: me, kicking and screaming, while the devil carried me down to hell.
I swallowed the lump in my throat.
I found it odd they kept my mother’s painting on the wall but covered it with a sheet like the beginning of too many haunted house films. Though, maybe Vera just didn’t like to dust.
“When did she die?” I asked.
“Not long after you were born, if I remember right. She got sick and could not get better. This was her home. Your papa could not part with it, so Vera and I take good care of the place for him.”
“My father didn’t live with her?”
He pursed his lips, contrite. “No, girl, your papa was married.”
And there it was. The secret family.
Or, maybe I was the secret.
Was that why he told people I died? So he could live his comfy life here, without me getting in the way?
In the end, I knew that wasn’t true. Papa had been around for more holidays than he was away—until this past year at least.
But knowing he kept something like this from me, that I might have siblings and other family I’d never had a chance to meet . . . The pain hit me in the chest so hard I had to focus on something else, or I wouldn’t be able to breathe. I forced my gaze back to the portrait, noting the dress that had to be from the eighteenth century.
“Why is she dressed like that?”
His eyebrows rose. “You do not know? Your mother was an opera singer. A very . . . beloved one at that. People will remember her, and that is why you need to go home.” He grabbed my bag and ushered me to the door.
“I didn’t even get to drink my coffee,” I protested.
“You do not want the coffee; you want secrets I cannot tell you. Go home, wherever home is, and do not come back.”
“Do you know where I can find my papa?”
“Probably Siberia,” he muttered, opening the door and letting the frigid air in.
Siberia?
“Why would he be—?”
“I do not know of his whereabouts or his number these days, or I would have already alerted him of your presence.” He threw my bag onto the porch.
“Are you sure I can’t stay here?”
“I like my head where it is now, attached to my neck.”
I blinked. “Is that a no?”
He pushed me out into the cold.