As the door eased shut, Jo stared at the man who might be her brother, reading the features of his face, trying to see what they shared with her own. When his eyes swung to hers, she flushed and glanced down.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to keep looking at you. I’ve just never been with anyone who I’m related to—or might be related to.”
Manny stretched out his legs and leaned back in his stiff little chair. “That’s understandable.”
Jo blinked quick and tried to remember where he had left off when the doctor had come in. It had been a shock—and a relief—to find out her birth mother had not in fact died. And there was so much else to learn.
“So you were telling me about you—our . . . father?” she prompted.
“Yeah, sorry.” He lowered his forearm and pushed at the cotton ball that had been taped into the crook of his elbow. “Like I said, his name was Robert Bluff. He was a surgeon, and my mom met him at Columbia Presbyterian when she was an ICU nurse. He died in nineteen eighty-three in a car accident. Buried in Pine Grove Cemetery. I can take you to his grave sometime if you like.”
“I would. Please.”
“They were never married or anything. And she never really talked much about him. Somewhere in my stuff back at the house I’ve got some newspaper clippings on him and I’ll show them to you. And I also have one photograph. But that’s it, I’m afraid.”
“And she—our mother—is definitely alive, though?”
“Yes.” Manny cleared his throat. “She lives in Florida. I bought her a house down there a couple of years ago. She’s retired now.”
“Do you think . . . would she . . .” Jo shook her head again and tried to ignore the pain in her chest. “I mean, obviously we need to wait for the blood tests to see if—”
“Of course I’ll introduce you.” He shifted to the side and took a phone out of the white coat he was wearing. “Here, let me show you a picture. You must be wondering what she looks like.”
As he scrolled through his cell, Jo was aware of her heart pounding. And when he held out the Samsung, her hands shook as she took the thing.
The image on the screen was black-and-white, and the young woman with the thick, dark hair seemed haunted as she stared at the camera.
“I thought you’d like to see an early picture first. That’s actually when she was pregnant with me. Here, let me show you a more recent one.”
Jo gave the phone back, and couldn’t help but hope there was another snapshot, a couple of years more recent, of the woman . . . pregnant with Jo.
“How old are you?” she asked. When he told her, she was shocked. “So you’re much older than me. God, you look terrific.”
“Thanks. And here’s a more recent one of mom.”
Jo braced herself as she took what he put out once again. This time, the photograph was in color, and the years showed on that once unlined face. Not that the woman wasn’t attractive—and she still had the thick brown hair. But the eyes remained shadowed and there was still that tension around the mouth and the brow.
“What’s her name?”
“Shelley. Shelley Manello.”
When Jo returned the phone to him, he stared at the picture, something in his expression shifting.
“I don’t have to meet her,” Jo said through a tight throat. “I don’t want to cause any problems.”
“No. I would never keep the two of you apart.”
“So what’s wrong?” Jo closed her eyes and shook her head again. “You don’t have to answer that.”
“Hey, siblings, right?” His dark brows lowered even further. “And I’m just trying to remember.”
“What?”
“When she was pregnant with you.” Manny looked up sharply. “I am not doubting anything you said. I just . . . going by how old you are, I’d have been out of the house and in college, but you’d think I’d recall. Or that later, she would have told me about it.”
Jo fixated on the back of the phone as he focused on the front. In the silence, unease trickled down the back of her neck, like ice-cold water dripping from some kind of height.
What if Bill had been wrong with his research?
Her dread that that might be the case told her how much she wanted to be Manny’s sister. It was funny how this stranger had made her feel so grounded. Especially given that Syn had left the room.
“But you know,” Manny said, “things were tight for Mom and I back then. From day one, she’d been bound and determined that I was going to go to medical school and I was going to become a surgeon and I was going to be somebody. She was a nurse, and she was always taking extra shifts to afford my education. My main memory of her from my childhood was of how tired she always was. If she happened to have gotten pregnant again when I was away at school? I mean . . . there was no way she could afford to keep it given my costs.” He winced. “You, rather. Keep you. Sorry. I feel like I’m—”
“Don’t ever apologize. I’m the disrupter, not you. Besides . . . maybe she didn’t want to be pregnant with me.” As his eyes lifted to hers, Jo pictured the image of that haunted face. “Maybe it wasn’t that it was an unintended pregnancy. Maybe it was the result of . . .”
She couldn’t say it.
But given the way Manny squeezed his eyes shut, she didn’t have to.
“We could be half-siblings,” she suggested sadly. “Maybe Robert Bluff was not my father. Maybe . . . it was someone else.”
Manny rubbed his face.
“It would explain why she never wanted to tell you about me,” Jo said hoarsely.
Jo unhinged her arm lock and removed the cotton ball and the tape. Beneath the white puff, there was just the smallest of marks, a red dot that was already healing in her skin.
The idea that she had been worse than a mistake . . . that she might have been from some kind of sexual violence? That she could well have been something her mother had tried to abort and failed?
As tears came to Jo’s eyes, she looked around for something to wipe them away with.
Manny was the one who delivered the Kleenex to her, reaching to the counter and then extending the tissue box across the space that separated them.
And then he was getting up, and coming over. Hopping onto the exam table with her, he put a strong arm around her shoulders and pulled her in close.
“I am so sorry . . .” she said as she started to sob over the suffering of a woman she had never met.
On the other side of the exam room’s door, Syn sat on the concrete floor of the training center’s corridor. After Manny had properly stitched him up, he had stepped out, ostensibly to give the siblings privacy. In reality, he had needed time to think.
And then he’d heard every word Jo said. Every single one.
As she spoke about the circumstances of her birth—or what she feared might have happened—he knew what the answer to her question about feeding had to be.
Getting to his feet, he turned and faced the door of the treatment room. With a shaking hand, he laid his palm upon the closed panel, as if he could reach inside through the chains of molecules between them, the space that separated them, the distance between his heart and hers . . . and bring her something other than grief and chaos and misery.