I nodded because if I’d opened my mouth, I would have come apart.
When I came back in, Frank looked asleep. I sat and slid my hand under his.
His fingers closed around my wrist. Hard.
“Promise me you’ll hear all of it before you hate me,” he said.
I stared at him. “I could never hate you.”
His skin was cold under mine. “I’ve lied to you your whole life.”
I tried to laugh it off. “Dad, you’re exhausted. Let me call the nurse—”
“My mind is clear.” His grip tightened. “Everything you think you know about your childhood — about who I am — it’s only half the story.”
My pulse started slamming.
“What are you talking about?”
“I need you to find out before I’m gone. Even though I swore I’d carry it to my grave.”
A dozen questions crowded in at once. Was my real father alive somewhere? Had he hidden letters from me? Was there another family, another version of Frank I’d never been allowed to meet?
His hand shook as he pulled a folded scrap of paper from beneath the blanket and pressed it into my palm.
“Go there. Tonight.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“You have to.” Tears slid into the gray stubble along his jaw. “Please, Rosalie.”
He hadn’t called me Rosalie since I was small.
I bent down close to his face. “Just tell me yourself.”
His eyes drifted shut. “Some truths need a different voice than mine.”
Those were the last words he ever said to me.
The monitor began to chirp, and a nurse hurried in to check his pulse and adjust the oxygen. “He’s still with us,” she said quietly. “But he may not wake again.”
Out in the hallway, I unfolded the paper. An address, written in Frank’s shaking hand, less than twenty minutes from the house he’d raised me in.
I almost threw it away. Whatever was behind that door couldn’t possibly matter more than the man dying in the room behind me.
Then I remembered the look on his face. It hadn’t been fear of dying. It had been fear that I’d never truly understand him.
I got in the car.
PART TWO — The House With the Star Cutter
I drove through streets gone empty and gray, both hands locked on the wheel, inventing worse and worse possibilities the whole way there. A secret wife. A stranger waiting to tell me Frank had never wanted me at all.
