“That doesn’t matter, Mom.” An odd tone entered her voice. One of longing and urgency. Her gaze remained on O’Neill’s face. “There are…other things…I need to know. Things you can’t help me with, but he can.”
Off-balance, Muriel wavered. “Honey, at least wait until I have a chance to tell you what happened.”
After a long, tension-filled second, Gracie shifted her gaze to Muriel. “Please, Mom. I really need to talk to him.”
Need.There was that word again.
Muriel studied her daughter’s face. Gracie wasn’t going to tell her what was going on with her, or why she needed to talk to her father. She’d have to find out alongside O’Neill. She stepped aside and gestured toward the door. “Go on then. We’ll play this Gracie’s way.”
He hesitated, then stepped forward. His face carried the exact same expression as Gracie’s did—guarded. In fact, the resemblance between father and daughter was incredibly strong. And not just their wary expressions, but the faint glow in their green eyes. When had Muriel’s eyes started to glow? She’d never noticed that before. Maybe the shine came from the porch light’s reflection. But the resemblance was more than their eyes. Their hair was even the same shade of silvery brown.
She’d known Gracie resembled her father, but her memories of him were twenty years old, and she’d forgotten some of the details. Like the sheen to his eyes, and the way his hair turned silver beneath certain lights. She hadn’t realized they looked so much alike.
Muriel waited for him to pass through the door before following him inside the house and shutting the door behind her. Gracie led him toward the kitchen. But Muriel paused in the hall. After several deep breaths—in...out...in...out—her heart calmed. But weakness still shook her legs as she finally followed her daughter into the kitchen.
She found O’Neill just standing there, barely inside the archway. While Gracie stood braced against the refrigerator at the back of the kitchen. Tension rode the silence. Now that she had him in the house, Gracie didn’t seem to know what to do with him.
Muriel slid past O’Neill, stepped into the room, and gestured at the table. “Why don’t we sit? I’ll make some coffee.”
It was late for coffee but at least making it would give her something to do, and the beverage would focus her mind.
She went to work filling the water dispenser and adding scoops of ground beans to the filter. Behind her came the scrape of the chairs being pulled back, and the even heavier screech as they were scooted back in. By the time she turned back around with cups and spoons, the father-daughter duo had takenpositions directly across the table from each other and were busy staring.
The silence was deafening.
Regardless of her daughter’s insistence on this conversation, it was apparently up to Muriel to get the discussion going. With the sounds of percolation and the rich smell of brewing coffee filling the kitchen, she pulled out a chair at the table and sat down between them.
“Since I don’t need to introduce you two, how about we start with you Gracie.” Muriel said quietly. “You said you’ve known about him for years. When did you find out?”
Gracie finally pulled her gaze from O’Neill’s face and turned to Muriel. “Remember that trip to Europe when I was twelve and you got me that passport? Well, I needed it for a school project a couple of years later. I called you and you told me the passports were in the second drawer of the file cabinet in your office. While I was looking for it, I found the file from the private investigator.”
Muriel remembered the school project Gracie was talking about. Her daughter had created a montage of their European vacation from the previous summer, with stamps from the countries she’d visited. But that was five years ago. Five years and Gracie never indicated she knew who her father was.
“But detective Malone’s report never said why I wanted to find O’Neill. It never said he was your father.” She was certain of that.
O’Neill stirred at the mention of the private investigator, a frown crossing his face.
Gracie shrugged. “It wasn’t hard to figure out why you were looking for him. The file listed the date he left theBrenahiilo,which was eight months before my birthdate. Why would you be looking for some random dude from your past unless it had something to do with us?” She shrugged again. “Because his age was the same as yours, I figured he must have gone to schoolwith you. So, I looked him up in your senior yearbook. As soon as I saw his picture, I knew for sure. I look like him.”
“You hired someone to look for me?”
Muriel glanced at O’Neill. She couldn’t tell from the neutrality in his voice whether that news pissed him off. Not that it mattered. She’d done what she’d had to do.
“Nobody knew where you’d gone. I tried to find you myself, but you’d just…vanished. So, I hired someone with experience in tracking people down.” She paused, before adding quietly. “Daniel and Gracie deserved to know their father and you deserved to know you were a father.” Another pause, followed by a sigh. “But even the expert couldn’t find you. Samuel never told me you were at Shadow Mountain.”
O’Neill’s face was perfectly still as he digested that. He finally stirred and scrubbed his palms down his face. “I only came to Shadow Mountain a year ago. Benioko tracked me down and insisted I join him on base.”
Muriel waited for him to continue, to explain where he’d disappeared after high school. But he turned back into silence and stone, so she refocused on her daughter.
“Why didn’t you tell me after you found out? I would have told you everything.”
Gracie shrugged and looked away. “I didn’t think it mattered.”
There was more to her daughter’s silence than that, Muriel was certain of it. But she was equally certain Gracie wouldn’t share the real reasons, at least not yet. Not here.
“Did Daniel know about me?” O’Neill asked quietly, but something flickered across his face. Something that looked like pain. Or regret.
“I don’t think so,” Gracie said. “I never told him.”
