My stepdad raised me from the time I was four years old. He walked me down the aisle, held my daughter the day she was born, and never once let me believe I was anything less than his. Then, with hours left to live, he pulled me close and said the words that broke me open: “I’ve lied to you my whole life.” He pressed an address into my palm and told me to go there before I hated him. What I found on the other side of that door didn’t just answer a question. It rewrote everything I thought I knew about the man who loved me.
PART ONE — The Whisper
“He always cut them into stars,” I told the nurse, nodding at the tray beside Frank’s bed. “Even when I was thirty-five, married, with a daughter of my own, he’d still dig that little tin cutter out of the drawer.”
