“Pastor Ricky will see you now,” the plump woman with the bottled blond hair said to Travis as he sat in the lobby of an office that looked more like it belonged in a country club than a church.

He followed the woman down a short hallway and past a heavy wooden door. There wasn’t a set of chairs waiting for him on the opposite side of an intricately carved desk, but rather an entire plush sofa that was probably more expensive than the entire contents of his home combined, even pre-garage sale.

“Thank you, Linda,” said a man with grey-streaked hair, smoothed back almost into a pompadour as he leaned back casually in his tall leather chair. Linda closed the door behind her once Travis was fully inside. “How can I help you?”

Travis glanced from the door to the sofa and back.

“Please, have a seat,” Pastor Ricky said, gesturing with his hand toward the sofa, but still reclining in a way that gave him an air of indifference. He was a gracious but uninterested host, in a turtleneck and sports jacket. If Travis hadn’t already known Ricky Chelate’s profession, pastor would have been his first guess. That or weather man.

“I believe you knew my mother, Rachel Butler? You had a relationship around seventeen or eighteen years ago?”

Nothing about Pastor Ricky visibly changed, yet somehow everything did. A current of tension charged the air that was previously as staid as the inside of a cedar chest.

“Can’t say that I do. I’ve been happily married to my lovely wife Ann for the past twenty-nine years.”

Travis hadn’t been expecting outright lies, but he tried to give Pastor Ricky the benefit of the doubt. “I’m sorry, but I found a note with your name and number mixed in with some of my mother’s things. It gave me reason to believe that you’re my sister’s father.”

All pretense gone, wheels screeched against hardwood floors as Pastor Ricky sat forward. His lips sneered into thin lines that paralleled deepened ones across his forehead.

“I can’t believe she sent her son. I told her years ago that if I gave her money to make her go away, she couldn’t contact me ever again. Are you telling me she had the thing?”

So many pieces clicked into Travis’s mind. That his mom bought Molly’s when she was pregnant with Caitlyn. That she absolutely refused to name the father. That she avoided Copper Beach and city events like the plague, preferring to see the Otter Rock Fourth of July fireworks or Christmas lights displays instead of Copper Beach’s larger and nicer versions.

All to avoid this piece of shit.

“Actually, my mother passed away a few months ago. She never told any of us about you. Like I said, I came across your name and number scrawled on a bar napkin in a box full of things she saved. I looked you up online, and well, one look and it’s obvious who you are.” Travis pushed to his feet and placed his hands on the front of the desk. Leaning in didn’t seem to intimidate Pastor Ricky in the least, but it made him feel a little better. “I had hoped, because Caitlyn is having a hard time with Mom being gone, that meeting you might fill a part of her life that’s missing, but I can see now that was a terrible idea. It would be better for her not to know you at all than to find out what a miserable and hateful person you are. Excuse me.”

Travis left without a backwards glance. The pastor’s face had remained stony during his little speech, but he’d had enough conflict for a lifetime and no desire to tempt more, despite how his tongue had run away with him back there. He had hoped to have good news for Caitlyn for once. Instead, all he had was good riddance.

Thank God Caitlyn was still working at the library by the time Travis returned home. It gave him time for further investigation. He now knew without a shadow of a doubt that Ricky was Caitlyn’s father, but Ricky’s commentary niggled in the back of his brain. If the hat boxes were to be believed, Travis’s mom had kept every significant scrap of correspondence from her adult life. There had to be more evidence now that he knew what to look for.

Travis cracked open a lemonade and sat on the floor by the coffee table. He sorted the papers from the hat box into groups. Cards, notes, report cards, artwork, and miscellaneous. Why his mom had kept a ten-year-old copy of the receipt from her ingrown toenail removal, Travis couldn’t possibly guess. The miscellaneous pile started to overshadow the other piles until Travis sorted them into roughly five-year intervals and started pulling out receipts.

Finally, Travis stumbled upon a letter with a cleared check stapled to it.

Have the procedure or don’t. I don’t care, but do not contact me or anyone in my family again, or I will seek a restraining order.

RC

He had seen it the first time he sorted through the contents of the box, but without context, he hadn’t realized what he was looking at. Now he did.

The check was made out to Rachel Butler in an amount that clearly was meant to buy someone’s silence. It had worked for seventeen years. Although the check came from the bank account of the New Hope Church, it was signed by Ricky Chelate.

Fuck. How was he going to tell Caitlyn?