“What’s on your mind, son?”
I’d been lost in my head the last ten minutes, not knowing how to start the conversation I wanted to have. I had asked Bianca’s dad to join me for Bandit’s walk, then was nearly silent the entire five-block walk to the park. “Sorry. There is something that’s bothering me.”
“Would you like to talk about it?”
“I don’t know where to begin.”
“How about at the beginning? I’m in no rush. The pharmacy can hold until the morning, if need be.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay.” There was a park bench to the left of the walkway we were on. I motioned to it. “Would you like to sit?”
“I’m fine. We can keep walking if you’d like.”
Not knowing any other way to break the news, I blurted out, “You know my father. My name is Dexter Truitt.”
Bianca’s father, Taso, stopped short in place. He looked me in the eyes. Finding I was dead serious, he said, “Maybe we should have a seat after all.”
“She was going to live with her mother. I might be old school, but a girl belongs with her mother if it’s at all possible. There was never any fight for custody. I didn’t want her to hold a grudge against the woman she needed to look up to.” Taso shook his head and sighed. “Eleni didn’t want to lie to her. It was all my idea. I didn’t fight her for custody of the girls, agreed to the support she wanted, and promised I’d never miss a visit with my daughters. In exchange, I asked her for two things in return. One of them was to say it was me who had had the affair. Eleni wouldn’t come right out and say it, wouldn’t lie to the girls, if asked. But she promised to never tell them outright. The night I left for good, I apologized to the girls for what I’d done to break up our marriage. All the years that followed, they never asked anything else about my supposed affair, and Eleni never told them anything different.”
“Bianca harbors a pretty heavy grudge against you still.”
Taso’s shoulder’s slumped. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I know. When I came up with the plan so many years ago, I figured they were kids and would get over it. Bianca, though, she could never really forgive me.”
I realized in that moment how much trust Bianca was placing in me by giving me a second chance. She’d never even afforded her father that same opportunity. I turned to Taso and looked him straight in the eyes. “I have to tell her.”
He stared at me for a long moment. “I understand. She’s not a little girl who needs protecting anymore. She’s a grown woman who deserves the truth from a man she clearly cares about. The lies were what ended things between Eleni and me. I loved her. Part of me still does, if I’m being honest. But when I figured out what was going on, I gave her a second chance. Thought maybe we could move past it, if we worked hard enough. A few months after, things had just started to settle down again, when I caught her in another lie. Went to her office and found…well…I’m sorry…you don’t really need to know the details.”
After that, we sat and talked for a while longer. When my phone buzzed in my pocket, I realized I’d been gone for more than an hour. Taso saw me check my phone.
“My daughter?”
I nodded.
“You should go. Get this off your chest. She’s a big girl, loves her mother. She’ll eventually understand that sometimes when one person makes a mistake, it’s not always only that person’s fault. She’ll get over it. Just make sure you’re there for her when she needs to work through it.”
We both stood. I extended my hand to Taso. “Thank you for understanding.”
“Take care of my little girl.”
Knowing it was the right thing, didn’t make it any easier. I stood outside of Bianca’s door for a few minutes before finally growing a pair and knocking. She answered almost immediately and stepped aside for me to enter. Bandit charged ahead and disappeared inside.
“I was starting to think you weren’t coming back.”
“Sorry about that. I was talking to your dad, and we must have lost track of time.”
“You two seem to have hit it off. I hadn’t really thought of it until I watched you together, but you sort of remind me of my dad.” She scrunched up her nose. “Is that weird?”
“Only if that makes it weird for you.”
She smiled. “Would you like a glass of wine?”
“I’ll take something stronger, if you have it.”
Bianca went into the kitchen and brought us each back a glass. Mine was filled with an amber liquid. When she sat down and looked at me expectantly, I gulped back half of it without even a sniff test.
She got right to the point. “Something has been troubling you since you knocked on my door earlier. What’s going on?”
I took a deep breath. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“Okay…”
“It’s something you’re not going to be happy about.”
It was her turn to drink some liquid courage. She tossed back half her wine glass and then looked me straight in the eyes. “I prefer the truth, even when it’s something I might not want to hear, Dex.”
“Alright.” There was no easy way to say it, so I just let it rip. “My father had an affair with your mother.”
The floor was going to be worn from her pacing. Bianca had her silver stress balls singing a mile a minute in her hand as she walked back and forth. I’d explained what I knew from my talk with my father, and now she was trying to make sense of the lies. She’d passed through the disbelief stage and moved on to angry in the last fifteen minutes.
“Why would he lie and make me hold it against him for the better part of twenty years?”
“He was trying to protect you.”
She froze. “By lying to me? Lying doesn’t protect anyone but the liar.”
“I think there are two kinds of lies. A lie to protect something and a lie to escape something. He wasn’t trying to escape anything.”
“So you think it’s okay that he let me spend all this time thinking he was a cheater?”
I rubbed the back of my neck. I needed to be careful here. Bianca was only beginning to trust me again, and it probably wasn’t a good idea to have her suspect I was okay with any lying at all. So instead of giving her an opinion on whether her dad did the right thing by lying, I decided to refrain from having that conversation. I’d been giving her distance, but I felt like she needed physical comforting almost as much as I needed to give it to her.
Stepping into her pacing trail, I covered her hands with mine. The low hum of her stress balls quieted. “Come here.” She hesitated at first, but then let me wrap her tight in my arms.
“God, Dex. I feel like my entire life was a lie. I thought my dad was the bad guy, and my mother was the good guy, but in truth it was the opposite.”
“I don’t think there was a good guy or a bad guy. I think one person just made a mistake and the other tried to make it so that mistake wouldn’t keep you from seeing all the goodness in that person.”
She was quiet for a long moment. When she finally spoke, her voice was shaky. “My mom’s a cheater.”
“Don’t let it define her. People make mistakes, Bianca.”
She pulled her head back. “Do you see your father as a cheater?”
“Yes, but that’s different. My father didn’t make one mistake. His entire life was a series of affairs, lies, and cheating. It wasn’t one mistake, it was a thousand lies.”
“How do I know my mother isn’t the same way? For all I know, she had a thousand affairs, too.”
“You’ll talk to her. You’re not a kid anymore. She’ll tell you the truth.”
Bianca had another glass of wine, and we talked for a while longer. Then she asked me to stay the night. She wanted me to hold her, and I wanted nothing more than to give her whatever comfort she needed. I’d stripped out of my clothes but left my boxer briefs on before slipping into bed. Tonight wasn’t about sex, even though I’d be lying if I said her ass didn’t feel spectacular as I molded my body around hers from behind. I kissed her shoulder once as we spooned in the darkness. “Get some sleep. We can talk more in the morning, if you want. Okay?”
She sighed. “Okay.”
After a few minutes, her breathing had slowed and I thought she had fallen asleep. Her voice was a whisper when she spoke. “Dex?”
“What do you need?”
“Thank you for telling me the truth tonight. I know it couldn’t have been easy to do.”
“It wasn’t. I hate the thought of causing you any pain, and I knew this would be very difficult for you to hear.”
“It was. But having you here really helped me get through it.”
“I’m glad.”
“I mean it. That was a horrible truth to face, and you made it bearable.”
I kissed her shoulder again. “I get it now. We can get through anything together as long as we’re honest with each other.”
I had no idea at the time, but getting through anything wasn’t always possible.