“No.” “Did you ever plan to tell me?” Her silence lasted too long. Mark stood abruptly. His chair struck the wall behind him and bounced.
Laura flinched. Mark saw the fear and hated it, not because he was going to hurt her—he never had, never would—but because everything in the room suddenly felt contaminated by versions of himself he did not recognize. Husband. Father. Fool.
Victim. Maybe uncle. Twelve percent. He could not make the categories align. “Who?” he asked again.
Laura whispered a name. “Daniel Mercer.” Mark stared. The name took several seconds to find its place in memory. Then it did.
Daniel Mercer had been Mark’s older brother’s college roommate. Not Mark’s friend exactly, though he had been close enough to the family in the late nineties to appear in photographs. He had spent holidays with the Whitmores when flights were too expensive to go home. He had stood beside Mark’s brother, Andrew, at his wedding. He had attended Mark and Laura’s engagement party.
He had been in and out of their lives for a few years, a tall dark-haired man with an easy laugh and a restless habit of moving from city to city for work. Mark had not seen him in nearly seventeen years. The twelve percent suddenly became more confusing, not less. “Daniel?” Mark said.
Laura nodded. “That doesn’t make sense.” “What?” “Twelve percent. If Daniel was the father, Tyler and I shouldn’t share twelve percent.
We weren’t related.” Laura looked at him, horror slowly replacing grief. Mark felt his stomach drop. “No,” he said. Laura blinked.
“No,” Mark repeated, more to himself than to her. “Daniel wasn’t related to me.” He grabbed the paper again and scanned the relationship estimates. Twelve percent. An uncle.
A half-sibling. A grandparent. The dining room seemed to tilt. Mark looked up. “Laura,” he said.
“Did you sleep with Andrew?” For one second she did not react at all. Then her face collapsed. Mark stepped backward as if the answer had physically struck him. “Oh my God.”
“Mark—” “Oh my God.” “It was one time.” He turned away so fast his hip hit the table. A wineglass tipped but did not fall. Cranberry sauce trembled in its bowl.