LITMIR.BIZ

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courts decide, Maddy, Rachel Stillman is not my daughter.”

      “Whatever you say, Carver.”

      “She’s not my daughter,” he repeated adamantly. “She’s not.”

      She was his daughter.

      As soon as Carver saw the girl walk into the terminal, he knew without question that she was she was the fruit of his loins. Her dark brown hair and pale blue eyes, her lanky build and accelerated height, her square face, thin nose and full lips…

      Had Carver Venner been born a girl, he would have looked exactly like Rachel Stillman when he was twelve years old. And he probably would have dressed like her, too, he thought. Except that his clothes would have fit. Everything Rachel wore—from her plaid flannel shirt and Pearl Jam T-shirt to her tattered army fatigues—were about four sizes too big for her. Even her boots looked as if she’d pilfered them from a six-foot-plus construction worker.

      Her hair hung down around her shoulders with two strands in front wrapped in some kind of multicolored thread, and when she tucked the uncombed tresses behind her ears, he saw that one was pierced approximately a half dozen times, the other even more. Seemingly hundreds of bracelets made of everything from rubber to straw circled her forearms, and a long pendant—a peace symbol almost identical to one he’d worn when he was her age—swung between what would someday be breasts.

      She approached him without ever slowing or altering her stride—as if she knew as immediately as he that they were related—eyed him warily, sighed dramatically, cracked her gum a couple of times and said, “I’m not calling you Daddy.”

      Nonplussed, Carver fired back, “Who asked you to?”

      Rachel shrugged, as if she couldn’t care less about anything, nodded toward the cigarette burning between his fingers and asked, “Got another smoke?”

      He glanced down at his hand, then back at the girl. “What, for you?”

      She nodded.

      “Are you nuts?”

      This time she shook her head.

      He sucked hard on the cigarette, and amid a billowing expulsion of smoke asked, “Don’t you know these things will kill you?”

      She eyed him blandly. “Doesn’t seem to worry you too much.”

      “Yeah, well…” Carver looked down at the cigarette, reluctantly tossed it to the floor and ground it out with the toe of his hiking boot. He frowned. “Well, maybe it should worry you.”

      She made a face, one Carver was certain was endemic of twelve-year-olds everywhere. “Nothing worries me. I’m a kid. Haven’t you heard? We’re immortal.”

      Oh, yeah, Carver thought. She was his offspring, all right. Sarcastic, cocky and smart-mouthed as all get out. He suddenly regretted a lot of things he’d said to his own parents when he was a boy.

      Without even realizing he needed to sit down, he slumped into a nearby chair. He dropped his head into his hands, raked his fingers through his hair and tried not to panic. A daughter. God. Who knew?

      “Mom told me I could get my nose pierced back in L.A., but she, you know, checked out on me before she could sign the permission slip. So, what do you say? You got a problem with it?”

      Carver looked up again to find that his daughter—his daughter—had taken the seat next to his. She studied him with a steady, to-the-point gaze, apparently completely unburdened of any grief one might have expected her to feel for the loss of the woman who had raised her.

      “Checked out on you?” he repeated incredulously. “Your mother is dead, and that’s all you have to say about it?”

      Rachel rolled her eyes and toddled her head around in the way kids do when they don’t want to be bothered with adults who are clearly idiots. “She wasn’t exactly June Cleaver, all right? It’s hard to miss someone who wasn’t, you know, there to begin with.”

      Carver stared hard at the girl, trying with all his might to be sympathetic. But he could no more remember what it was like to be twelve years old than he could imagine a mother who wasn’t around. Ruth Venner had always been there for her kids, no matter what kind of demand they were making. She had been June Cleaver, right down to the pearl necklace. And although, thanks to his job, Carver knew a lot more about the world than most people, he still had trouble dealing with the whole neglected kids thing.

      “She traveled a lot?” he asked. “Who took care of you?”

      Rachel rolled her eyes again, and Carver thought that if she didn’t cut it out, they were going to roll to the back of her head and get stuck for good, and then where would she be?

      “It’s not that Mom wasn’t around,” she said. “It’s that she just wasn’t there. You know?”

      For some reason, Carver understood exactly what she meant, and he nodded.

      “I mean, they told you how she died, right?” Rachel asked.

      He nodded again. “Drunk driver.”

      “Did they tell you she was the drunk driver?”

      Carver looked up into clear, matter-of-fact eyes, eyes that held not a clue as to what their owner might be feeling. “No, they didn’t tell me that.”

      “Yeah, well, so now you know.”

      “I’m sorry,” he said, the phrase all that came to mind.

      “Look, don’t get me wrong,” Rachel told him, her gaze dropping to study the toe of her boot. “She wasn’t a bad mom. She just wasn’t like most moms. She loved me and all that, but I don’t think it ever occurred to her that she was the one who was supposed to be responsible.” She shrugged philosophically. “I learned to look after myself.”

      Carver hesitated only a moment before asking, “Do you miss her?”

      Rachel shrugged again—a gesture Carver was already beginning to realize meant that she was stalling until she figured out what to say—and stared at her feet some more. “Yeah. I guess so. She was pretty tight. All my friends liked her all right.”

      “How about you?”

      “I liked her, too.”

      Carver sighed and tilted his head back to study the ceiling. “Yeah, so did I. I’m sorry she’s gone.”

      The two of them sat in silence for some moments, until Rachel finally broke it by asking, “So, are you really my dad?”

      Carver turned his head to look at her, to see if there was anything of Abby in her at all. He was shocked to realize he couldn’t even remember what the mother of his daughter looked like. But there was a sprinkling of freckles over Rachel’s nose, and her eyelashes were impossibly long. He supposed she’d gotten those features from her mother. Everything else about her screamed Carver Venner.

      “Looks that way,” he said after a moment.

      “Mom told me you’re a journalist, too.”

      He cocked his head to one side thoughtfully. “What else did your mom tell you about me?”

      “Not much. Just that she met you in Guatemala, that you wrote for some left-wing magazine, that you were a great kisser, and that she didn’t see any reason why you had to know I was around. She never told me your last name or where you lived.”

      He expelled a single, humorless chuckle, wondering if Rachel might have tried to look for him if she’d known who and where he was. All he said in reply though, was, “I guess she covered all the important stuff then.”

      Rachel dropped her gaze to her feet again, tugging on a loose thread that pulled a small hole in her fatigues. “After she died, I found her stash of some of the articles you wrote. You work for that magazine, Left Bank, right? The one that’s getting sued by the

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