“Dad, I’m doing the best that I can,” she protested. “I’m still getting used to all of this. I only learned about her a few days ago. How long has she known about me?”
“Months,” her father replied reluctantly. “But you were very standoffish.”
“Because she’s a stranger to me,” she argued. “I literally met her today. I’m afraid it’s going to take more than one lunch for me to feel sisterly feelings about her. If I ever do.”
Her father was shaking his head before she even finished.
“She’s your sister, pumpkin. She’s family.”
Maddie didn’t know what to say. Her father, normally a calm and reasonable man, was acting like someone she didn’t know at all.
“You can never have too much family,” Gwen said. “It’s important.”
Maddie agreed that family was important. But she’d always thought that chosen family was just as important, if not crucial. She thought about the people that she and Tanner had become close to over the years. Seth and Presley, Logan and Ava, Jared and Misty, Rayne and Dare. That was only a few of them. The list went on and on. She’d trust these people with her life. She simply couldn’t say the same for Stacy. Not yet, anyway.
She didn’t much appreciate her dad scolding her or being pushy about it all. As far as she was concerned, he wasn’t free from dirt in all of this. He still had a lot to answer for.
“Dad, did you ever tell Mom about what you did?”
Her father’s mouth fell open and his face turned a reddish shade.
“I can’t believe you’ve asked me that question.”
“I can’t believe you cheated on Mom so that makes us even. Did you? Did you tell her?”
She already knew the answer just from the expression on his face. He hadn’t said a word. He’d kept his affair a secret.
“Not that it’s any of your business, because it isn’t, but no. I didn’t tell her. I didn’t see any point. It was just one night, and I wasn’t planning to do it again. I decided that it would only hurt her if she knew, and that I would make it up to her by being the best husband I possibly could.”
“You decided for her? She didn’t get to decide? You were dishonest. You lied, and now you’re trying to make up excuses for what you did by saying you were protecting her. My mother didn’t have the opportunity to make up her own mind about what you did. She wasn’t a child, Dad. She was a grown woman that was kept in the dark because you knew you did wrong. Maybe Mom wouldn’t have wanted to stay married if she knew what you’d done. But you never gave her the chance to decide that. You decided for her.”
Her father appeared shocked, the blood draining from his face.
“I can tell you that divorce never would have been on the table. We never would have split up.”
“How do you know? How can you be so sure?”
“We were committed to one another,” he argued. “We were married.”
“How committed were you when you slept with another woman?”
Her dad stood partially out of his seat. He was furious with her, but she couldn’t seem to stop the flow of words out of her mouth. She was angry, too. How dare he act like she didn’t have any right to be? She loved her father, but she didn’t like him much at the moment.
“I am your father and you will not speak to me that way.”
“I am not a child,” she replied quietly, gathering up her purse and jacket. “I will not be scolded into silence. I will not censure what I need to say because you don’t like hearing it.”
With that, she stood and walked out of the restaurant, not giving one look back. She’d said her piece and now she was going to sit in the car and cry.
Because it was all messed up. And she didn’t have a clue as to how to fix it.