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  “It’s nice to meet you, Melanie,” Alana said. “The boys told us you were coming, but to be honest, they didn’t tell us much about you.”

  She didn’t get a bad vibe from the woman, just a curious one. Fortunately, Davis stepped in. “Kirby, we should say it.”

  “Davis—”

  “Mom, Dad, she’s our girlfriend.”

  Mel waited for the explosion, watching as the older couple shared a long, silent glance.

  It was Jonas who recovered first. “You’re poly?”

  Mel’s eyes widened. “Um, huh?”

  “Yes,” Davis said.

  “What?” Kirby asked.

  These three reactions happened simultaneously, leaving Mel, Davis, and Kirby staring at each other.

  Davis once again opted to take point. “Yes, we’re poly with her.”

  Mel wondered if a crack would open up in the floor under her. Maybe a sinkhole. Swallow her whole, because her face felt scalding hot right now.

  “Oh,” Alana said. “That’s nice.”

  She couldn’t help it. Her gaze swiveled to Kirby, who she was relieved to see wore the same look of shock she imagined she now wore.

  He finally stepped forward. “Okaaay. Just to be clear, you understand that she’s both my girlfriend and Davis’ girlfriend. Right?”

  Jonas nodded. “Yes, that’s what poly usually means.”

  Davis turned to Mel and Kirby. “Why did you two seem to think this would be difficult to do, to tell them?”

  Alana laughed, but it sounded a little nervous to Mel’s ears. “Never mind, honey. Is everyone hungry? Let’s eat.”

  * * * *

  Mel wondered if there’d be a delayed explosion from the parents after she left, and the longer they acted nice to her, the more nervous she felt.

  She got that was a totally illogical reaction, but she never claimed to be logical.

  After dinner, she needed to use the bathroom and Alana directed her to one in the hall.

  There, Mel stood in front of the mirror and stared at herself. This felt totally unreal.

  Completely.

  Yes, during dinner, Jonas and Alana had asked her personal questions, about her life, her job, her family, but not in a rude or probing way. Much like anyone would ask personal questions of someone at a social dinner.

  Nothing else had been said about their relationship.

  Zero questions asked about that beyond how long they’d known each other.

  They’d already agreed that when asked how they met they’d leave it at the suggested answer “through mutual friends” that many people involved in BDSM used when asked how they’d met someone.

  It was the truth, sort of.

  Close enough.

  Finally, she used the toilet, washed her hands, and emerged from the bathroom. The house was clean and comfortable, warm, inviting. Quaintly cluttered, the way bookworms frequently were. It was easy to see the family loved books from the shelves lining many walls. On the way back to the kitchen, she hesitated in the living room when she spotted one bookshelf.

  The exception to the rule.

  The only perfect, immaculate corner.

  Wandering over, she realized this was the urn of the friend the men had told her about. There were over a dozen pictures, too, of an obviously younger Alana and Jonas with a third man.

  A familiar-looking man…

  When her eyes settled on a lone picture of him, it finally clicked.

  Now she studied all the pictures, and she saw it.

  The way the man didn’t look at the camera.

  The way he did look at Alana.

  The way he really didn’t smile.

  The picture of both men and Alana holding the newborn twins, and another picture of the man with the babies.

  One of Alana and the man. She smiled at the camera while he was totally focused on her.

  A man who looked exactly like—

  “That was our…friend, Parker.”

  Mel jumped at Alana’s voice. She spun around, unable to think of an adequate response.

  She didn’t have to.

  “He died when the boys were babies,” she said, looking heartbroken.

  That sealed it for Mel.

  She knew.

  Knew.

  Because watching her nearly broke her own heart. She imagined if one of her men died, that was a similar expression to what she’d wear.

  “I’m sorry. The guys told me about him.”

  “Thank you.” She walked over to the shelf and touched the urn in a way that Mel knew happened probably multiple times a day. The fact that there wasn’t a speck of dust on the urn or on any of the picture frames of him also told her this was a shrine.

  A shrine to a man she’d loved.

  “Are you all right?” Alana asked.

  “You know, I’m fighting a headache, I’m sorry. I think I’m going to head home.” Mel power-walked out to the kitchen, to the guys. “Hey, I’m going to head home.” She kissed Davis, then Kirby, before either could argue with her. “I’ll see you later.” She forced herself to smile at Jonas. “Thank you so much for your hospitality. I’m sorry to leave like this. I’ll make it up to you both.”

  Alana had followed her to the kitchen. “Did you want some ibuprofen or something?”

  “No, I just need to lie down, I think. I’ve had a stressful week.” She forced another smile. “Thank you again for dinner. It was so lovely getting to meet you and I’m looking forward to coming again.”

  Forcing herself not to run, she grabbed her purse and keys and headed to the front door, the men scrambling to follow her.

  “Are you okay?” Kirby asked outside by her car.

  “Yeah. Just…nerves. The week finally got to me. Sorry. Stop by later, okay?” She kissed him. “Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  “Love you,” Davis said.

  She kissed him, lingering, cupping his cheek. She couldn’t tell him. Hell, she could be wrong, for all she knew, misinterpreting everything.

  Somehow, she didn’t think that was the answer. That’d be too neat, too tidy.

  “I love you, too, Sir,” she said before getting into her car. The men retreated to the front porch while she backed out and headed home.

  Fuck.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Mel suspected she’d end up questioned later that evening by Kirby about her sudden departure from their parents’ house. Even if Davis noticed something was amiss, he’d likely not bring it up.

  In some ways, that was a blessing.

  She didn’t want to lie to either of them, but things just did not add up and she was a horrible liar. To sit there and be turning the blatantly obvious truth over in her head while trying to maintain a normal facade wasn’t possible for her.

  Best to go home and digest and let it settle and figure out how to later pretend to act normally around the older Silvas despite something not adding up in their story.

  And how to keep her knowledge from Davis and Kirby. They obviously didn’t know.

  She’d been home maybe fifteen minutes when someone knocked on her door. Expecting it to be either Kirby or Davis—or both—Mel was more than a little shocked to see Alana Silva standing outside her door.

  The older woman nervously smiled. “Can I come in?”

  “Sure.” Mel stepped aside for her. “Why did you come?”

  “I wanted to talk to you. Alone. In person.”

  “Oookay?” Melanie had a feeling she really didn’t want to have this conversation.

  “When you were at our house with the boys earlier, I think you figured something out. I wanted to talk to you about it before you talked to them.”

  “How’d you get my address?”

  “I asked Davis. I told him I wanted to send you a thank you note for the fruit salad you brought. Oh.” She sheepishly smiled as she pulled out a small envelope and handed it to her. “Thank you.” She shrugged. “I didn’t want to lie to him.”

&n
bsp; Melanie had a feeling Alana wouldn’t leave until she had her say, and at least she didn’t appear to be angry with Melanie for dating her sons. “Let’s sit down.”

  Melanie took the chair while Alana settled on the couch. “I guess I should get right to the point. Are you serious about our sons?”

  Maybe this conversation wasn’t going to go the way Mel thought it was after all. Ironically, this would, by far, be the easier discussion to have with the older woman. “I am. I love them both, which I know sounds unusual, but—”

  “Jonas isn’t Davis’ biological father,” she said.

  Oh, shit. “Excuse me?”

  “They’re twins, but they have two separate fathers.” A sad expression filled her features “We lost Parker when the boys were just a couple of months old. He was killed in a car accident, but we never told the boys he was anything other than a friend.”

  Melanie stared at her, unsure what to say. Yes, she’d connected the dots about Davis’ parentage, especially considering how similar he looked to the man she saw in the pictures.

  But her line between dots had apparently zoomed off the page into majestically wrong territory in the process.

  “I taught school for a lot of years,” Alana said. “I recognized your look at the house. You figured it out.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “I’m not asking you to keep this a secret from them. But I wanted you to know first.”

  “Uh, shouldn’t they be the ones to know?”

  “It honestly wasn’t a concern before. They’ve never met someone like you before. Someone that they wanted to have a poly relationship with. Because if you do have children with them, I want you to be fully informed. We never knew how to tell them and as the years went on and we realized Davis had issues to deal with, it…” The older woman looked emotionally lost.

  Mel gave her an out. “How did you three meet?”

  “In college. Well, I met them in college. They met in junior high. Parker was in foster care and Jonas befriended him. They were in the same classes and Parker was being bullied. Jonas stood up for him and they became inseparable.”

  “Foster care?”

  “His birth mother gave him up for adoption. She was a single teen mom. His first family didn’t complete the adoption when they realized he had special needs, and from that point on he bounced around the foster care system. Jonas’ parents adored Parker and took him in. When I met them, Parker, even though he was only a year older than me, he was already working on his Masters degree.”

  Alana sighed. “Davis is a lot like Parker in many ways, and not just physical appearance. Parker had far more social anxiety than Davis does. Or perhaps the intense early intervention Davis received helped mitigate it a lot more. And as the boys grew older, we didn’t know how to tell them. It would have meant uncomfortable questions for young children to ask. They know Parker was a dear friend of ours for years, and had been living with us when he died.”

  “When did you find out that Jonas was Kirby’s father?”

  “When we first realized Davis had issues. And to be honest, some of those signs might have come up earlier, but I was so wrapped in my grief every day it was all I could do to get out of bed and take care of my babies. Once we finally realized Davis was showing some unusual symptoms, they did a lot of testing and blood draws and all sorts of things to rule out infections and other issues. Things didn’t add up, so we asked for a DNA test to confirm it.”

  “Bet that was an interesting conversation with your doctor,” Mel muttered.

  “Oh, it was. I needed Jonas there with me to help tell it, to assure them it was all consensual and I hadn’t been cheating on him. Again, those were different times. But we also knew Parker’s issues. When Davis was little, there wasn’t a lot of nuance in a diagnosis of autism, and there wasn’t really a separate diagnosis from Asperger syndrome back then, either. Especially so when Parker was growing up. He was a functional person, so nothing more was done.

  “It was a completely different time. They didn’t know a fraction about it that they know now. If Davis went through the school system now, he’d probably have a diagnosis somewhere on the mild end of the autism spectrum. So would Parker, although his was a little more involved in some ways. There is an increased chance of the traits being passed on. There have been studies of identical twins that show a greater incidence of other issues in the second twin if the first is diagnosed on the ASD spectrum. And now some scientists think maybe it’s possibly even linked to chemical exposure. The bottom line is, right now, they don’t have a smoking gun they can point to.

  “But since the boys are half-brothers…well, you can see that Kirby didn’t inherit those traits. We did research Parker’s birth family after he passed and after we realized Davis had issues, and we discovered that Parker’s birth father definitely fits into the ASD spectrum.”

  “How?”

  “We met him, Jonas and I. We told him we were friends of his son and skirted around the truth a little. He was single and worked as a statistic analyst for a large polling company.”

  “What’d Parker’s father say?”

  Alana hesitated and Mel wasn’t sure if she was overcome with emotion or just looking for a way to phrase it. “We could have been telling him the temperature outside for all the impact or emotion it had on him. After loving Parker, I wanted to get to know his family, if they’d let us. We both did. I was used to Parker’s personality quirks and giving him a lot of latitude because of them. I knew the man underneath the surface. I loved him fiercely because of who he was, the totality of him.

  “But Parker’s father, I couldn’t get through to him. Neither of us. We tried, thought maybe telling him he had a grandson, maybe that would help. He was completely uninterested in connecting with us in any way. I’m sure given more time, perhaps we could have made progress with him, but he didn’t want to and we had two young sons to raise who needed our full attention.”

  “Did he have any other kids?”

  “No. He was single and his parents had passed already, and he had no siblings. No other living family. He made it clear that he didn’t want to change that situation, either.”

  “This is going to sound rude, but how did he even father a child?”

  “Jonas did ask that. I think Jonas was even more upset than I was. Remember, he’d known Parker longer than I had. We were both trying not to show how upset we were, trying everything we’d learned from years of being with Parker to try to reach this man. Apparently, he’d been in a service club in high school, insisted upon by his parents to get him to ‘socialize.’ Someone spiked the punch at the party and people got drunk, and the girl had really liked him and took her chance.”

  “What about Parker’s birth mother?”

  “She refused to meet with us. We’d tracked her down through the state adoption records, and they contacted her and she wanted nothing to do with us. She apparently went on to marry someone and have a family with them.”

  This was getting even deeper and murkier—darker—than Mel ever suspected the conversation would go. “I think I’m starting to understand why you didn’t go down this rabbit trail with the guys.”

  Alana nodded. “I’m not trying to scare you off, dear. That’s not why I’m here. I could see how you and Davis interact and there’s a spark there when he looks at you that I’ve never seen in him before. I see him pushing himself in good ways that made him very uncomfortable in the past. The fact that you’re a poly triad is inconsequential to me, because we lived it ourselves, even though the boys didn’t know that. So I want you to have all the facts now.”

  “You hid the truth from them.”

  “How do you explain the complexities of the situation to two young children, especially one who doesn’t deal with sudden changes very well?”

  “But they’re adults now. They’re forty-one. They need to know. They deserve to know.”

  The sorrow in Alana’s eyes nearly broke
Melanie’s heart. “I know we should have told them, but it got to a point where we decided we needed to focus on them. Jonas loves both of them, just like Parker loved both of them. Jonas is listed on their birth certificates as the boys’ father, because that’s the way Parker wanted it. Parker wanted Jonas and I to get married, and when I found out I was pregnant, we knew there was a chance it could be either man. When we discovered I was carrying twins, we didn’t want to get our hopes up that maybe they were from each, even though we realized it was possible.”

  “When did you know?”

  “I suspected when they were born. Kirby had blue eyes and Davis didn’t. Davis looked like Parker. But we didn’t know for sure until…later. After DNA testing.”

  “How did Parker really die?”

  “It was a car wreck. That much is true.” Her gaze dropped to the floor for a moment before she continued. “I was heading home from a pediatrician appointment with the boys and got a flat tire. I didn’t have a jack in my car. This was before cell phones. Even though there were car phones, we couldn’t have afforded one. I was still on maternity leave from teaching, Jonas had just started working a few months earlier after graduation, and Parker was working on his doctorate. I was able to carry the boys across the road to a convenience store and called home. Parker had just gotten home from school and said he’d come change the tire for me.”

  She sniffled. “I carried the boys back to the car and sat there and waited. And waited. And waited. It was in a rural area. We lived in an old rented trailer out in the boonies because it was cheaper and happened to be private. I’m sitting there waiting and hear sirens in the distance. Then traffic starts backing from the direction I’d been heading, and there’s no traffic coming from the other way. So I figured there was an accident ahead up the road, which was probably why Parker wasn’t there yet. Stuck in traffic.”

  Large tears rolled down her face. “I even got a little aggravated that he didn’t turn around and go a different way. But I’d told him exactly where I was and he wrote it down and one of his tics was that when he started out a certain way, he didn’t just turn around and change course. He would sit in traffic for an hour even if he could turn around and go a few miles out of his way and save time. It was so hot and I was afraid to run the car because I didn’t want it to overheat. So I’m standing there in the shade off to the side with both boys in my arms, trying to keep them cool.