Their Child?. Karen Rose Smith

for years and years. I hardly know the guy.”

      “Lori. Come on. I mean, it seemed to me by the way you looked at him at the diner that you maybe kind of like him, too—and don’t give me that huffy look. Okay, he was my boyfriend. But that was centuries ago. And it was pure puppy love, anyway. I know that now. It was nothing like I have with Dirk—and it’s not like I slept with Tucker or anything. I mean, that might be kind of icky. To think of you getting together with some guy I’d seen naked, but—”

      “Lena.”

      “Um?”

      “That is altogether more information than I need to have.”

      Lena gave her another light slap on the thigh. “Oh, come on. I know what you’re doin’. Acting all snooty to push me away. You’re just too…private. You always have been. Even for me, it’s tough to get through. And, as your twin, I should be the one who understands how your mind works. Lori Lee, you need to…open up a little.”

      “Thank you for the input.”

      “Oh, now, don’t go getting snippy on me. Look in your heart. You’ll see that what I’m telling you is true. And I miss you, gosh darn it. We don’t see you often enough. It’s like, since all that mess eleven years ago, you never want to come home.” What could Lori say to that? Not much, since it was true. Lena went on. “I swear, sometimes I think if Mama and I didn’t call you all the time, if we didn’t keep you up-to-date on what’s going on in town and stay on you until you come home now and then, we’d never see you at all.”

      Lori caught her sister’s hand and twined their fingers together. “I know. I don’t visit often enough.” She said the words gently—and silently promised herself she’d make more of an effort to keep up the bond with her family.

      Lena heaved a huge sigh. “You know what?” Lori squeezed her hand to let her know she was listening. “I never did apologize to Tucker about prom night. Did you?”

      Lori blinked and felt her stomach squeezing tight all over again. She pulled her hand free of her sister’s. “I…when would I have done that?”

      “Relax. I was just asking. And think about it. The poor man still believes he went to that prom with me. I mean, it’s not that big a deal, but still, one of these days one of us ought to tell him. When I look back on that night, I sometimes wonder what could possibly have been going through my mind, to do that to him.”

      Lori remembered what had been going through Lena’s mind. She remembered with crystal clarity. Lena had told her. “You were mad. You were really steamed. You came home after breaking up with Tucker and you marched right up here to my room and shut the door and burst into tears. You said how you knew, you could tell, that Tucker was relieved to be getting rid of you. You said sometimes you hated being so perfect, you hated how everyone expected you to be so darn happy all the time. You said you almost wished you could be the mousy, shifty, shy one instead of me, how maybe then, folks wouldn’t expect so much of you.”

      Lena gasped. “How rude. I didn’t.”

      Lori nodded. “You did. Then you said you didn’t know how you were going to get through prom with a smile on your face, when all you really wanted to do was to scream and stomp your feet and tell Tucker off good and proper for not loving you enough to make you his bride and settle down in the Junction with you to live happily ever after. You said you were just sick. That you were just aching to stay home and watch old movies and eat a barrel of popcorn and have yourself a good long cry.”

      Lena made a low sound in her throat. “Well, now you say all that, I kind of do remember—and then you said how you’d like to go to prom…”

      Lori’s date, a friend, a fellow biology student, had come down with mono and had to beg off. And then there was the fact that Lori had had a secret crush on Tucker since long before he and Lena had started going out.

      Lena smiled a musing smile. “Yeah. Once you said how much you’d like to go to prom, things kind of took their natural course, now didn’t they?” She giggled. “I’m still amazed at how well we pulled it off.”

      Lori had to agree on that point. “Me, too.” For twins who’d always claimed they weren’t joined at the hip like most identicals, it was surprising how easily they’d each slipped into the other’s skin.

      Lena said, “Even Daddy and Mama were fooled. Remember Daddy, snapping away, taking all those pictures of you in my dress, telling you how beautiful you looked, thinking the whole time he was talking to me?”

      Lori couldn’t help grinning at the memory. “And you spent the night dragging around in my pajamas…”

      Lena giggled some more. “Mama kept checking on me. She’d say, ‘Lori, sweetie, it’s not the end of the world to miss your prom.’ And then I’d let a few tears dribble down my cheeks and hang my head the way you used to do, all pitiful-like, and whisper, ‘Mama. Please. I’d prefer to be alone.’ And then you, what do you know? You went and got yourself crowned prom queen.”

      “No. I got you crowned prom queen.”

      Lena pretended to scowl. “I have to admit, I was just a teensy bit jealous when I learned I won—and I wasn’t even there to get that rhinestone crown on my head.”

      “You? Jealous? Never.”

      “And then you came home so late. It was practically dawn. I was pretty darn put out with you about that—about you going out with my boyfriend and having such a fine old time, you didn’t want to come home.”

      Lori felt a deep and awful stillness within herself then—the stillness that came with telling too many lies, with spending too many years waiting for those lies to catch up with her. She’d been vague that night—or rather, that morning. She’d told Lena that she and Tucker had gone out for breakfast. Since Lena would never in a thousand lifetimes have imagined that Lori would go to a motel with Tucker, the lie had worked. Lena never questioned it.

      Lena said, “It was a crazy time, wasn’t it?”

      “Oh, yeah. It sure was.” The night with Tucker had been like a world apart, the one special, enchanted evening when, at last, her every dream of being Tucker’s girl came true. And then she’d come home and looked at her twin and it hit her like a safe dropped on her from a tenth-story window: she’d betrayed her own sister. Even if Lena and Tucker were going their separate ways, it still felt to Lori like a line she’d had no right to cross.

      But she had crossed it. And from that morning on, things only got worse. Tucker came to the door to beg Lena to take him back—because of the night before, Lori knew it.

      Lena sent him away and told Lori, “It’s the best thing. And he knows it, too.”

      By the next night, with all the turmoil inside her over the forbidden things she’d done and the lies she’d told everyone to cover those forbidden things up, she was a complete wreck.

      “And then, the next night,” Lena said, eerily echoing the direction of Lori’s thoughts, “you took Daddy’s car and, pouf, you just disappeared.” Lena sent her a reproachful look. “You never did tell me what happened, with Brody’s dad that night. You never told me how you met him, how you—”

      Lori put up a hand. “I can’t. Not right yet.”

      That was another promise Lori had made herself. She was going to tell Lena the whole truth, too. But it only seemed right that she should tell Tucker first. Just as it only seemed right to wait until after the wedding to break the news to Tucker.

      The wedding meant so much to Lena. If word got out beforehand that Tucker Bravo was Brody’s father, there was going to be talk. A lot of it. Lena’s big day would be thoroughly overshadowed.

      Lori refused to let that happen. Tucker had gone all these years not knowing he was a dad. What difference could it make if he waited two weeks