I looked at her.
“What is he talking about?”
“Anna…”
“What is he talking about?”
Mom sat slowly.
For the first time in my life, she looked old.
Not sixty-seven.
Old.
“There are things your father and I never told you.”
I could hear my heartbeat.
“What things?”
She looked at Tyler.
Then at me.
And said:
**“Your father wasn’t your biological father.”**
The words didn’t fit inside the room.
I almost smiled because they sounded absurd.
Dad had raised me.
I had his mannerisms.
His stubbornness.
His habit of reading instruction manuals before opening boxes.
“What?”
Mom began crying harder.
“I was twenty-seven. Your father and I had separated for several months. I had a relationship with someone else.”
My hands went cold.
“Who?”
She hesitated.
Aunt Diane whispered, “Evelyn, tell her.”
Mom looked at me.
“Robert.”
For a second I thought she meant someone else.
Then Uncle Robert put down his wineglass.
My mother’s younger brother.
My uncle.
The room seemed to tilt.
“No.”
Robert stood.
“Anna, listen—”
I stepped backward so violently my chair toppled.
“No.”
“It was before he married your aunt—”
“No.”
“It was one night.”
I stared between them.
My mother.
My uncle.
The man who had taught me to ride a bicycle.
The man whose daughters I called my cousins.
My mother had slept with her own brother?
Then Robert said something that made even less sense.
“Evelyn is not my biological sister.”
Silence.
