"Fourteen and a half years ago," Irene said to Lucy, very low, "your mother asked to meet your father one more time, to beg him for a single visit. One meeting, in a diner in Cadott. One meeting turned into more than one."
"I loved her," Russ said into his hands. "I never stopped. God help me. I loved Dana, I loved our life, I loved Paige. But I never stopped."
"And then I came," Lucy said.
Her voice was small. All three adults turned to look at her as if they had forgotten she was there, and maybe they had. She stood with one hand still on the green coat and she felt very far away from everything, as if she were watching the kitchen from the bottom of a swimming pool.
"And then you came," Irene said.
"And you stayed," Lucy said to her father. "You stayed here. With them."
He lifted his head. "Lucy—"
"You came on Wednesdays." She could feel herself shaking. "You came on Wednesdays and every other Sunday. You took me to Culver's. You came to my birthday and you left before the cake because you had to get home. Mom always said you had to get home. And I thought—I thought it was because of some other family that wasn't mine. I thought Paige was just some girl you had with somebody else. Mom never said. She never said one word." Her voice rose. "She could have told me. She could have told me I had a sister. A real one. She could have told me and I would have—I don't know what I would have done. But I would have known."
"She was going to," Irene said. "At sixteen."
"She signed something too," Russ said quietly. "When Dana found out about you. About Win and me. Dana wanted—" He glanced back. Dana didn't stop him. "Dana wanted Win to stay away. Completely. Never contact Paige. Never tell you, because if you knew, you'd tell Paige. That was the price of me staying. Of the support payments. Of me getting to see you at all."
"And Mom said yes," Lucy said.
"She said yes to get you a father," Irene said. "One day a week. That's what she traded. She thought one day a week was better than none."
Lucy looked at her father, the man who had taken her to Culver's on Wednesdays, the man she had loved with a kind of hopeless, waiting love for thirteen years. She had always thought he left early because of somebody else. Now she knew it was because of somebody else. It was just that the somebody else had been her sister.
"Everybody signed something," Lucy said. "Everybody signed something except me and Paige."
Nobody had anything to say to that.