For Our 10th Anniversary, My Husband Gave Me a Green Dress and My Sister a Baby novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Be Big About It

My father rang my mother's doorbell at eight on Tuesday morning, holding a grocery-store bouquet.

I was at the kitchen table with the lawyer's name Abel had texted me and a cup of coffee going cold.

My mother looked through the peephole.

"Don't open it," she said. "I mean it, Phoebe."

"Martha." My father's voice came through the wood, soft and wounded. "I only want to see my daughter."

"You have two daughters," my mother said, loudly enough for the street. "You can see one of them in the other direction."

"Please. This is a family matter."

I got up and opened the door myself.

He stood on the porch in his good camel overcoat, with his white hair combed back.

Harold Thornbury at sixty-six still looked like a man who had been told all his life that he was handsome.

He held out the flowers.

"Phoebe, sweetheart."

I didn't take them.

"Bethany called me at midnight," he said. "She's been sick with worry. She hasn't eaten. You know she's carrying, and in her condition she can't take a lot of stress."

"Neither could Mom," I said, "the week you left."

He blinked.

For a second his face went hurt and baffled, the look I remembered from when I was twelve and begged him to stay.

"That's not fair," he said. "That was different."

"How?"

"I fell in love," my father said. "People do. It happens. Graeme made a mistake, and he's sorry, and Bethany's sorry, and there's a child coming. A grandchild, Phoebe. My first."

"A grandchild I'll be part of," he said. "Families forgive. They find a way. I think you owe it to the baby to be big about this."

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