There was too much running through Cal’s mind for him to have any ability to nail down a single thought and try to absorb it. The information was so strange. There were too many pieces and too many players. Had he ever suspected that his father might have a sixth child? It seemed preposterous. For so long, the whispers had all been surrounding Jesse, but she was quite literally an innocent in this.

“Cal?”

He looked up to find Jesse staring at him. His brain was on overdrive. All he could think about was the number of times that he had heard his mother being upset at his father in the last few weeks. Had his father been telling her things? Had Joe Hernandez sensed that his time was getting short? Had he been trying to make peace? And how could his mother have completely missed the mark on what was going on?

“Cal.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not ignoring you.” Cal rubbed a hand down his face. “I’m just trying to figure out how this could go so completely wrong.”

“What could go wrong?” Jesse was still looking through the contents of that box. “I’m over here trying to figure out how my mother got these letters.”

“Huh?” Cal’s brain stuttered. “What do you mean?”

“They were sent to your father. I mean, presumably.” She glanced into the box. “There aren’t any envelopes. Do you think she wrote him letters but never sent them?”

Cal hadn’t even considered that possibility. “You mean that she felt so alone that even her journaling wasn’t cutting it?”

“These predate those journals.” Jesse’s voice began to rise as she seemed to get more and more excited. “Think about it! These letters are like the prequel to her journals. The journals were from her marriage. I said she always journaled, but that’s because she did as long as I was around. I remember her writing in a journal from the time I was little.”

“Therapists tell people to write letters,” Cal mused. “My mother used to do that. She said her therapist told her to.”

“What?” Jesse drew back, looking alarmed. “Your mother had a therapist? What happened to the letters?”

“She burned them.” Cal began to wonder. He scratched his lower lip and gave it a tug. He was starting to see a lot of things that had happened in his childhood as slightly suspect now. “She claimed that the therapist had told her to burn the letters as a way to let go of her feelings.”

Jesse made a face. “I suppose that seems reasonable.”

“I suppose. But what if part of the reason she burned them was that she didn’t want this happening?” Cal made a gesture to the table in front of them. “Your mother kept everything. It hasn’t exactly done us any good though, has it? We have more questions than ever before.”

“We have answers,” Jesse insisted. “We know that my mother had another child. There is another kid out there. I’m not the love child.” Jesse jumped to her feet suddenly and fisted her hands together. She waved them at the ceiling and laughed as though she had lost her mind. “I’m not your sister! Do you know how good that feels?”

Cal did not remind her that, for whatever reason, their parents had continued to carry on the affair long years after that so-called love child had been born. Which brought his mind back around to a question that he’d tossed around a lot lately. “Can you remember your parents fighting about anything before they died?” Cal asked Jesse.

“Fighting?” She looked confused. “About your dad? No.”

“No. About anything.” He struggled to get his point across without deliberately tarnishing her memories of her parents. “You know, do you remember if they were having just run-of-the-mill marital problems? Were they arguing? Were they not speaking to each other?”

She sat back in her seat and frowned. “I guess that’s kind of hard for an eleven-year-old to judge, really. My dad had been on edge lately. He had been super grouchy. The day before they died, he got pissed at me for something I thought was pretty minor. I took Pixie out in the snow to ride, and he blew up at me when I got back.”

“About what?”

“That’s the thing,” she murmured thoughtfully. “I don’t know. I’ve always thought of that as part of the unfinished business when they died. It felt like there were plenty of things like that. Why did Daddy yell at me? What did I really do? Why had my mother been in the house sitting in her bedroom for like two days? Was she really sick? Was it something else?”

“Sick?” Cal immediately picked up on this. “You said your mother was sick the last few days before the accident?”

“That’s what Dad said,” Jesse amended. “He told me she was sick and we needed to leave her alone.”

“So, maybe they were fighting?” Cal mused. “They were fighting. Your mother came over to my place to talk to my dad because she needed an old friend and he was the only person she had ever felt really understood her. Right?”

“Right.” Jesse did not sound happy about this development. “I guess that’s possible.”

“Why did they go to the Farrells’s that night without you?” Cal suddenly realized that nobody had ever really answered this question. It had been over a decade, and it still made no sense why Jesse would not have gone to the Farrells’s house with her parents for a family dinner.

“I always stayed home when they went over on Tuesday nights for supper.” The words came out automatically. Jesse’s expression said as much. Then she seemed to realize what she was saying. Her expression froze, and she looked almost sick.

Cal got up from his chair and moved closer to Jesse. “Why?”

She was looking positively twitchy. She stood up and began to pace back and forth in front of the buffet. The old carpet was worn nearly threadbare in places, and Cal could nearly imagine her mother doing the exact same thing when she was trying to puzzle through how her life had ended up so much differently than she had imagined it would.

“Who were the Farrells to us?” Jesse whispered. She stopped pacing and looked right at Cal. “Do you think we could talk to Melody? She’s engaged to your brother Cisco, right? She owns the Farrells’s house. All of their stuff is still in it.”

Jesse’s words reminded Cal that there were still pieces of this puzzle that went together but did not make a picture. “You know who was very close to the Farrells? Or at least he says he was.”

“Weatherby!” Jesse began bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. “Oh my God, I forgot about that! He was always showing up at their place pretending to be nice. At least that’s what my dad always told the Farrells.”

“What?” Cal drew back and looked at her. It was like he’d never seen her before. “You’ve never said anything about that before.”

“It never seemed important.” She shrugged it off. “Think about it. Why would anyone care what my father thought of Paul Weatherby? The guy is fake. He’s always been fake. I can even remember Mr. Farrell tsking at my father and telling him that Weatherby meant well. The Farrells were always just so nice to everyone.”

“And it got them screwed over in the end,” Cal muttered. It still burned him to no end that Paul Weatherby had tried to snatch the Farrell ranch right out from under their granddaughter, Melody. “If Cisco hadn’t intervened and set that situation right, Melody Farrell would be living on the streets and still owing the state for back taxes on that property instead of owning the whole thing and leasing it.”

“To the Hernandez Land & Cattle Company,” Jesse mused. “That must stick in Weatherby’s gut like a dirty knife.”

“Okay, we have too many pieces.” Cal took Jesse’s hand and dragged her toward the front door.

“What are you doing?”

He unlocked the door. “Getting some fresh air.”

“You know we have two poor horses who would probably like their saddles off and a chance to lounge in the barn for a while,” Jesse reminded him.

Cal shrugged it off. “They’re working animals. As long as they aren’t chasing after cows or riding fence lines, they’re happy.” He pushed the door open and stepped onto the little porch. It was really a nice house. “Wasn’t this place in your father’s family for years?”

“Yes.”

“Do you ever remember your parents saying that they were related?”

“What?” She jerked her hand out of his grip and put it on her hip. Then she glared at him. “Are you calling me inbred?”

“No!” Cal rolled his eyes. Was she really this obtuse? Sometimes Jesse’s brain moved too quickly for her logic to catch up. “I’m not talking about first cousins. I’m talking distant. Very distant. Think about it. Why else would your mother come here? At all. Ever?”

“Oh.” She finally stopped looking daggers at him and moved toward the porch railing. Her fingers seemed to find grooves that were as familiar as breathing. She leaned away from the porch post and hung there for a moment as though she were a child once again. “I see what you’re saying. You think my mother was visiting the Farrells when she met your father. She gets pregnant, has to stay here to have the baby, because let’s just say my grandparents would have flipped out. Then she meets my father and has dinner with him on Valentine’s Day, and the rest is history.”

Cal figured this was all reasonable. “It wouldn’t be a stretch to think about your father and your mother both being distantly related to the Farrells. Your father had probably been over to the Farrell place a few times while your mother was there, so he wasn’t totally unfamiliar. Having dinner with him would have been a pretty logical next step.”

The slow recanting of the hypothetical story of her parents’ first meeting and subsequent relationship seemed pretty reasonable to Cal. Jesse’s gaze was focused faraway. It was almost as though she were looking out toward the Farrells’s ranch to try and puzzle out what had happened in the past.

She shuddered quite suddenly. It was as if someone had poured ice down her back. “Melody’s mother.”

“What?”

“Melody is how old?”

“I don’t know. Cisco’s age?” Cal hadn’t exactly asked everyone for birth certificates. “Why?”

“Melody’s mother would have still been alive!” Jesse turned to stare at him. Her eyes were alight with excitement. “Do you know what that means?”

Cal could picture it in his head, two young women, both attractive, and both ripe targets for men who took shameful advantage of them. Then they were left here with an aging couple that could not afford to take care of their babies.

Cal frowned. “You and Melody are too close in age. If your mother had another child, she must have either been older than Melody’s mother or there were a few years in there somewhere.”

“Does it really matter? My mother was probably pregnant with me when Melody’s mom got herself in the family way. Regardless, my mother must have stayed with her friend while she was pregnant. Call Melody,” Jesse insisted. “We have to call her. I have to know if there’s anything in that house about my mother.”

Cal pulled out his phone. He sent off a quick text to Cisco. Then he had to wait. There was nothing to do but wait.

“Well?” Jesse asked expectantly.

“I texted Cisco.” Cal shrugged. “I don’t think there’s anything for me to do beyond that. Do you?”

“Ugh!” she moaned. “The waiting is horrible. I think I’m going to die trying to figure it all out.”

“Should we clean up this mess?” Cal gestured back to the house and to the piles of cards and letters on the dining room table.

“No. I think we should keep going.” Jesse turned and walked back into the house. “Who knows what we’ll find next. Maybe we’ll discover that your parents had twins that were born before you, or something equally weird.”

Cal could not help but smile at her ridiculousness. “All right, then. Let’s go back in and hit it. Then we’re going to shower.”

She gave him an arch look. “Uh, you’re going to be going home to do that task. I’m totally not having some man messing up my bathroom and then leaving towels all over the place along with half of the dirt that he didn’t manage to wash off inside the shower.”

“What?” Cal was affronted. Then he could not hold back the laugh that wanted to burst out of him. “As I recall, you were the one who trashed the bathroom every morning. My God! The place smelled like a tropical garden when you finished, and there were cosmetics lining every single surface of the countertop!”

“There was not.” She put her hands on her hips and did her best to look indignant, but could not manage it. “Okay, so maybe I did leave stuff lying around. That was many, many years ago. And what would you know about that? You moved out to the bunkhouse just to get away from your own brothers because they were pigs.”

“I’m certainly not going to argue that point.” Cal would have been the first one to call his brothers pigs.

Something caught his eye. It was an old photograph framed and hanging on the far wall of the dining room. He had never really noticed it before. Had it always been there? Sometimes it was difficult to tell what Jesse had changed when she had moved into the place and what she had left exactly the same.

“What are you looking at?” Jesse frowned at him. “And if you try to tell me that the house is dirty and you’re just staring at the poor job I do of cleaning it, then I’m going to kick you right back out that front door.”

“I’m far too smart a man to criticize a woman’s housekeeping,” Cal told Jesse. Then he pointed to the photograph. “I’m trying to figure out where I’ve seen that before.”

“Oh.” Jesse headed for the picture and peered closely at it. “I found that in my folks’ stuff. It was with some other old photographs. I thought it looked really cool because it was taken right here on the porch way back when the house was new, so maybe five generations ago?”

Cal peered at the people in the picture. But it wasn’t the people who told him as much as the brands on the horses did. “Jesse,” Cal said slowly. “This is a photograph of the Weatherbys, the Farrells, and the Collins families.”

“What?” Jesse practically shoved him out of the way. “The words scrawled on the back say that it’s a Collins family reunion taken the year this house was built. The picture is old. In fact, I think it’s probably a reprint. Look at the quality.”

But there was no getting around the facts, regardless of whether or not they were etched in sepia or not. “Your family is related to the Weatherbys and the Farrells. We just have to figure out how, and I think we’re going to know a lot more about the whys of what’s going on.”