My heartbeat accelerated.
“What are you talking about?”
“I need you to discover the truth before I die, even though I was begged to take it to my grave.”
Questions rushed through my head faster than I could process them.
Was my biological father still alive?
Had Frank kept letters from me?
Had there been another family?
Was there an entire part of his life I had never known existed?
With trembling fingers, Frank reached beneath the blanket and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
He pushed it into my hand.
“Go there. Now.”
“I can’t leave you.”
“You have to.” Tears disappeared into the gray stubble on his jaw. “Please, Rosalie.”
He had not called me Rosalie in that tone since I was little.
I leaned closer over the bed.
“Tell me yourself.”
Frank closed his eyes.
“Some truths need another voice.”
Those became the last words he ever spoke to me.
A nurse entered when the monitor started chirping.
She checked his pulse before adjusting the oxygen.
“He is still with us,” she said. “But he may not wake again.
I stepped into the hallway and unfolded the paper.
Frank’s shaky handwriting filled the center with a single address.
It was less than twenty minutes from the house where he had raised me.
For a moment, I considered throwing it away.
Whatever existed at that address could not possibly matter more than the man dying in the room behind me.
Then I remembered the look in his eyes.
It had not been fear of dying.
It had been fear that I would never understand him.
I drove through nearly deserted streets with both hands locked around the steering wheel.
By the time I arrived, I had imagined almost every kind of betrayal.
A hidden wife.
A stranger waiting to tell me Frank had never actually wanted me.
An elderly woman answered the door.
Her hair was silver, her eyes a pale blue, and one hand immediately covered her mouth when she saw me.
She stared as if someone from the dead had appeared on her doorstep.
“Rosalie,” she whispered.
I gasped sharply enough to make her step backward.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Caroline.”
“How do you know me?”
She glanced past me toward the dark street.
“Frank called last month. He could barely speak. He said you might come one day.”
“Might?”
“He hoped he would find the courage to send you.”‘
She pulled the door open farther.
“I think you should come inside.”
Everything in me wanted to turn around and race back to the hospital.
But instead, I walked inside.
“Tell me what Frank lied about.”
Caroline remained quiet.
She crossed the kitchen and opened a drawer beside the stove.
Inside was an assortment of metal cookie cutters.
Hearts.
Flowers.
Animals.
Apples.
And one little star.
My breath caught.
It looked exactly like the star Frank had used every Sunday throughout my childhood.
“Where did you get that?”
Caroline picked it up gently.
“It belonged to Frank.”
“No. His is at my house.”
“He had two, dear,” she said.
Beneath the cutters was an old photograph.
Caroline lifted it out and passed it to me.
A little girl was standing beside a kitchen table, grinning over a plate piled with star-shaped apple pancakes.
She appeared to be around five.
Behind her stood Frank.
He was younger.
Thinner.
And smiling with a kind of happiness I had never seen in any photograph of him.
“Who is she?”
Caroline’s voice trembled.
“Her name was Miley.”
Something about the room seemed to close around me.
“Frank was married before he met your mother,” Caroline revealed. “Miley was his daughter.”
My fingers tightened around the edges of the photograph.
“Where is she?”
Caroline lowered her eyes.
“She died when she was five.”
The quietness of those words somehow made them worse.
“There was an accident at a lake. It happened quickly. Frank blamed himself even though there was nothing he could have done.”
I dropped into a chair because my legs could no longer support me.
“Why didn’t he tell me?”
“After Miley died, his marriage collapsed,” Caroline said. “He stopped speaking to people. He stopped answering my calls. We were best friends. He packed away every photograph, every toy, every reminder that he had ever been a father.”
My gaze returned to the small star-shaped cutter.
“The pancakes.”
“He made them for Miley.”
Caroline sat opposite me.
“Then one morning, after he married your mother, you climbed into his lap and fell asleep against his chest. When you woke up, you asked whether he knew how to make pancakes shaped like stars.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“You were four.”
She rested the cutter on the table between us.
“He called me that afternoon. He was crying so hard I could barely understand him. He said he had made the pancakes. He said he had spoken Miley’s name aloud for the first time in years and had not fallen apart.”
I gripped the edge of the table.
“He did not give you something that belonged to his daughter,” Caroline added. “You gave him a way to remember her without believing the memory would kill him.”
Tears distorted the kitchen around me.
“Then what was the lie?”
Caroline turned toward the window.
“After your mother died, Frank packed his truck.”
My stomach dropped.
“He planned to leave?”