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He bided his time, but each second’s delay rubbed his nerves raw. Keith stared at the flickering screen of the TV late Sunday night, comprehending neither sight nor sound in his festering impatience. The weekend Melissa had asked for was pretty much gone. She hadn’t said a single word about accepting what he believed was the inevitable, the only way to save her life.
A muffled groan from their bedroom tensed his whole being, and the soda can in his hand crumpled under the pressure of his helplessness. When Melissa couldn’t even find pain-free rest in a drug-induced sleep, it was time to do something...anything. And right now, his something was limited to just one thing.
Keith dropped the crushed soda can and hurried into his office. He opened a locked drawer in his desk and pulled out one of the cheap smart phones he’d purchased a few days earlier. He powered it up, made sure it was not linked to their home Wi-Fi, and connected to his new Instagram account. He scrolled through pages of mindless teen-aged chatter. Drama, drama, and more drama, or pointless one-upmanship.
Duck faced selfies.
Endless whining about the beginning of a new school year.
Who bought what shoes to wear on the first day of class.
Someone dreaming about being asked out by the latest Hollywood heartthrob.
Keith snorted. These kids, living in their isolated cocoons of privilege, had no idea what real life looked like.
One of them was about to find out.
With a few taps of a stylus he had a blank message box in front of him. He glared at the cursor and the blinking became a repetitive mocking. Do-you-dare, do-you-dare, do-you-dare?
“Yes,” he hissed as he tapped with the end the stylus, cursing the tiny keyboard. Keith longed for his computer, but Melissa’s old friends were cops. If they had the resources to track these messages, he didn’t want that coming back to his home.
He typed, he read, he deleted, then typed and deleted some more, cutting a sentence here, adding a word in there. Thirty minutes later he studied the finished product, his finger poised over the button that would send his solution winging into cyberspace without hope of recall.
Five sentences that could change the course of life for him and Melissa. Whatever the outcome of this desperate effort, his actions wouldn’t gain him any points with his wife. He closed his eyes, mentally weighing her favor against the life and death struggle they were embroiled in.
She’d understand, wouldn’t she?
He opened his eyes, and the cursor mocked him. A different refrain this time: Helpless, helpless, helpless...
Keith stabbed the button and sent his message into the void of the internet.
***
KINSLEY SAT ON THE edge of the bed Monday morning and tied her shoelaces. It wasn’t quite seven, and she didn’t really want to be up, but school started in a few days, and she needed to start pulling herself out of her summer routine, or the first week of her sophomore year would be murder.
Tenth grade. Real high school this year, not the one-step-above-baby, wet-behind-the-ears, first-year-out-of-middle-school freshman she and her friends had been last year. She liked school, and though she wouldn’t admit it out loud to any of those friends, she was looking forward to their first day of classes. Ready to face the day, she swiped her phone to life and found the devotion their youth pastor posted for them each morning.
Exodus 20:12 “Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.”
I know some of you are rolling your eyes at what you might consider a baby verse to start your week. But I want you all to think about the word honor. It means to respect, to have admiration for, to regard with a sense of pride.
Starting another year of school is a big deal. Every grade you progress, everything you learn prepares you to be the adults God intends you to be. It’s easy to allow some of those things to tempt us into believing that we’ve outgrown our parents. Nothing could be further from the truth. Parents are human and far from perfect, but getting you to this point in your life has taken a level of dedication on their part that you will not understand until you send your own child off to school. They deserve all the respect, admiration, and pride we can pour into them.
Kinsley smiled. Sometimes his devotions could make her squirm in her seat, pointing out little areas where she needed improvement, but not today. When it came to her parents, she knew exactly how lucky she was.
She opened her Instagram and scrolled through the recent posts, laughing at a joke Emma’d posted the night before. She added a smiley face in response and noticed the message indicator at the top of her phone’s screen. She opened it and saw that it was something from one of her new friends, Brenna Ford. Kinsley kept forgetting to ask Emma if Brenna was the cousin she’d mentioned a few weeks ago. She probably was since Emma was one of the followers they had in common. She shrugged and read the message.
You’re adopted. I’m not making it up. Ask your mother about the old college friend she had lunch with on the nineteenth. What reason did they give you about your doctor’s appointment? They lied.
Heat swamped her. “What?” She dropped the phone and sent a guilty glance at the closed door behind her. Well, that’s dumb. She swallowed, retrieved the phone, and read the message again.
Kinsley’s breath shuddered as she sat back, staring at words she couldn’t make sense of. If this was someone’s idea of a joke, it wasn’t a very funny one. And it had to be a joke, didn’t it? She closed her eyes.
Think, Kinsley.
OK, the doctor’s appointment hadn’t been a secret. Just because she couldn’t remember mentioning it to any of her friends didn’t mean she hadn’t. But... Ask your mother about the old college friend she had lunch on the nineteenth. A hard lump formed in the pit of Kinsley’s stomach.
Had Mom had lunch with a friend? Kinsley thought back and couldn’t nail anything down, but she’d been so involved with her own friends this summer, Mom could have made a quick trip to Venus, and Kinsley wouldn’t have noticed unless Mom wasn’t home in time to cook dinner. She opened the calendar app. The nineteenth had been a Wednesday, two days before her doctor’s appointment. She frowned in thought. Friday I went to the doctor, Thursday’s the day Mom got roughed up at work. Wednesday... She drew a blank there, but Tuesday night in the car coming home from dinner, Mom acted all weird after her phone rang. What had Mom said when Kinsley had asked who it was? Words coalesced, and the heat returned along with a roller-coaster stomach drop. Just...an old friend.
She brought the message back up and stared at the hateful words on the screen as tears blurred the edges. Stop it! You’re being a dork. Kinsley swiped at her eyes with fingers that shook and forced herself to take a few calming breaths. As she did, sound filtered up the hall. Her mom and dad. She tore her gaze from the screen and looked at the clock. It was still early. They were probably in the kitchen, sitting with a final cup of coffee.
Relief spawned hope. She’d show the stupid message to her parents, and they’d help her get to the bottom of this. More importantly, they’d deny the whole ridiculous idea, and Kinsley could go back to living in the security of the world she’d always known. She almost ran down the hall.
She slid to a stop just inside the kitchen, her tennis shoes squealing on the tile floor. Dad shook his head without looking up from the news on his tablet.
Mom smiled at her over her cup. “Good morning, sweetheart. You’re up earlier than I expected.” She started to push away from the table. “I’ve got just enough time before my workout to scramble you some eggs if you want.”
Kinsley shook her head. “I’m not hungry. I mean...can I...?” She faltered to a stop, ashamed of the way her words refused to form a complete sentence, knowing that she was about to bawl like a baby.
“Kinsley...”
Dad looked up, glanced at Mom, and frowned at Kinsley. “What’s wrong?”
“I...this...” Her hand shook when she held out the phone.
Daddy took it and tapped the screen to life. He read the message, closed his eyes, and passed the phone to her mom. She dropped it like it shocked her. Her hand flew to cover her mouth as her face paled.
Kinsley processed their reactions and their lack of denial. Any hope she had of their restoring normal to her life fled. With a churning stomach and her heart beating in her ears, she searched their faces for reassurance and found guilt. She closed her eyes, unable to accept the truth that her heart suddenly knew.
“It’s true?” The two words came out on a sob. The silence that followed her question was deafening consent. Kinsley folded her arms across her heaving chest and opened her eyes, hoping to see something to make this moment of horrible truth disappear. Mom watched her with tears streaming. Dad’s face lacked the animation she loved. They’d joined hands on the table, their knuckles white.
“Answer me!” Kinsley couldn’t remember ever raising her voice to either of them, but terror and panic had taken control. She stared at them, her mind numb, her body tense. “Please answer me.” Her words were a plea the second time.
“Baby—”
“Come, sit down,” her father interrupted, motioning to the chair next to him.
She wanted to climb into her daddy’s lap like she used to when something frightened her. He’d wrap his strong arms around her and nothing scary could hurt her. She wanted to run to her mother and bury herself against her. There was that spot on Mom’s shoulder where Kinsley could rest her head. The spot where she always knew that she was loved and protected.
What she wanted and what she could handle were two different things. Instead she pulled out the chair closest to her and dragged it into the doorway. Kinsley sat in the chair, her hands gripping the seat on either side, her heels bouncing in nervous tremors. So many questions, so much pain.
“I’m...” She swallowed, her mouth refusing to form the word her mind supplied. Her breath shuddered as she forced it out. “I’m adopted?” She met their eyes from across the room. Hope formed a tiny bubble in her chest. They could still deny it.
“Yes.” Her mother’s answer was barely a whisper, but it was strong enough to pop that tiny bubble. Kinsley doubled over in the chair, her stomach clenching. She looked up when she heard a chair scrape the floor. Her mom was on her feet, coming around the table. Kinsley scrambled to her feet and put the chair between them. Mom stopped two feet away, the pain on her face almost as raw as the pain in Kinsley’s heart.
“You lied to me my whole life.”
“We did what we thought was best. We love you,” Dad said.
Kinsley glared at him while questions whirled in her mind. She looked at the woman who’d pretended to be her mother. “What’s my mother’s name?”
Mom bit her lip. “Melissa...Ryder.”
“And my father?”
Kinsley’s eyes narrowed as Mom looked from her to her dad.
“We don’t know. Melissa...” Kinsley heard her mother swallow from two feet away. “Melissa didn’t know.”
Kinsley flinched as another block crumbled from the foundation of her life.
Her mom held out a hand. “Baby, please come sit down. I know you’re hurt and upset, but if you’ll give Daddy and me a chance to explain. We...we should have told you. We meant to tell you.”
Kinsley ignored her mother’s request and motioned to the phone abandoned in the center of the table. “Somebody beat you to it.”
“And we’re so sorry. We never wanted you to find out like this.”
“Or ever, I’ll bet.” She bowed her head. “This was the call in the car the other night.” Kinsley looked up, suspicious. “And the doctor appointment...the whole genetic deal, and it’s no biggie, just your turn.” She replayed the whole day in her mind. Every word the doctor said and everything he’d not been allowed to say. Her mother’s anxious efforts to rush her out of there. “If no one knows who my father is, then it’s my mother who passes this along.” She regarded her parents with narrowed eyes, trying to fit the pieces together. “Why now? What aren’t you telling me?”
Her parents looked at each other. Dad propped his elbows on the table and lowered his head into his hands. She stared at her mom from across the chair. “No more secrets, OK? I know there’s something else, and you need to tell me.”
“Baby, I love you so much,” Mom said.
Kinsley could barely stand under the weight of the morning’s discoveries, but she was prepared to stand there all day if that’s what it took to get the whole truth. She held her mother’s gaze and waited.
When her mother continued, the words were a whisper. “Melissa...your mother...she has the disease they were checking for. She’s dying.”
Kinsley absorbed the words, turned her back, and ran to the front door. She ignored the calls from her parents to stop, to wait. Throwing the door open she bounded down the steps, retrieved her bike from its place next to the front porch, and rode away.