Chapter 12: He's My Father

Alana stood on the top step with her suitcase in one hand.

Below us, my husband hammered on the street door again.

"Alana! I'm counting to three!"

She looked at the door, and then she turned and looked at us.

Her lip was bleeding where she had bitten it.

"Go ahead and open it," she said to nobody in particular. "He'll tell you I'm lying."

"Alana," I said. "Tell me what?"

She laughed, a high cracked sound I had never heard from her.

"I'm done being the niece," she said. "I've been the niece since I was twelve years old."

She put the suitcase down.

"Tom never had a daughter, Aunt Lydia. You're right. You counted it right."

I did not say anything.

"My name was never Rainey because of Tom," she said. "It's Rainey because of him."

She pointed down the stairwell, at the pounding.

"He's my father."

The words rang down the narrow stairs.

Below us, the pounding stopped.

For a second the whole building was silent.

"So he wasn't giving a niece my seat," Hattie said, so quietly that I almost didn't hear. "He was giving his other daughter a seat."

"He was giving me one he thought nobody would trace," Alana said.

I sat down on the step.

I did not decide to.

My legs stopped holding me.

Cedric crouched at my side with a hand on my back, and I let it stay.

"Tell me," I said. "All of it."

Alana sat down on the stair below me.

She wiped her mouth with the cuff of my cardigan, and she looked, for the first time, exactly her age.

"My mother was his girlfriend," she said. "Before you. For three years. He met you at a Holcomb fundraiser while she was pregnant with me."

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