stood only a few feet from each other, and he continued to stare at her. “How like your mother you are,” he whispered. “So beautiful…” He raised his hand as if to touch her face, then apparently changed his mind and let his arm fall. The love in his eyes was unmistakable.
At the mention of her mother, Lorraine felt her own eyes fill with tears.
“Raine, what is it?” He stopped short of taking her in his arms.
She stopped short of letting him. “Mom was killed April first,” she told him shakily.
Her father looked as if she’d suddenly reached out and stabbed him. His eyes widened with shock and then slowly, as though his legs would no longer hold him, he staggered toward a chair. “Killed? How? Dear God in heaven, tell me what happened.”
“She was on her way home from work. It’d been raining that day and no one knows exactly why, but her tires lost traction and her brakes locked—and she skidded into oncoming traffic. She was hit by a huge semi…There was nothing he could do to stop. Nothing anyone could do.”
Her father closed his eyes. “Did she suffer?” he asked, his voice so low it was an effort to understand him.
“No. The investigating officer told me death was instantaneous.”
Thomas nodded, his face wet with tears that ran unrestrained down his cheeks. “April first, you said?”
“Yes.”
He nodded again, reached into a pocket for his handkerchief and wiped away the tears. “I woke up that night.” He paused for a moment, apparently deep in thought. “My Ginny is dead,” he said as if he needed to hear himself say the words to believe they were true.
Lorraine sat down in the chair beside his. “Mom told me you were dead.”
“I know. We…we thought it best.”
“Why?” Everything Lorraine had endured today would be worth it if he could answer this single question.
Thomas inhaled a deep breath and turned to face her. He took both her hands, clasping them between his own. It was then that he noticed the ring.
“It’s Mom’s. I put it on the day of the funeral.” She told him a little about her engagement to Gary and then paused, needing answers before she continued.
His thumb tenderly caressed the wedding band. “I’ll love you always,” he whispered—the words engraved inside the ring. His eyes gazed into hers. “I loved your mother and you with all my heart, Lorraine. First and foremost, I need you to believe that.”
“Why would you leave us?” she cried. Now that she was with him, she wanted to know the truth with an urgency that left her trembling. For more than twenty years her mother had lived under false pretenses, and Lorraine had to find out why. She couldn’t imagine what would drive her parents to do something so drastic. Honesty had been the very basis of her mother’s character. Or so she’d thought.
“Mom loved you, too…all that time. She wouldn’t talk about you, especially once I got older. Whenever she did, she’d start to cry.”
“I know…I know.”
Tears spilled from Lorraine’s eyes. “She told me you’d died of leukemia.”
The merest hint of a smile touched his mouth, lifting one corner. “We concocted that story together.”
“But you’re alive!” She needed the truth, and quickly, while she was strong enough to bear it. “Please—tell me…”
“It started in Vietnam,” he said, his voice falling to a whisper. “In many ways, the man I was meant to be died there.”
“But you were a decorated hero! Mom said the thing she regretted most about the fire was that your medals were lost and—”
Thomas’s head snapped up. “She told you that?” His expression was sober. Regretful. “I was far from a hero, Lorraine. I deserted halfway through my tour of duty. I couldn’t take the killing any longer, the death….”
Lorraine didn’t want to believe what she was hearing. It couldn’t be true. Any of it. “But—”
“I returned to the States and joined a militant antiwar group. They helped me hide out. From the moment I turned my back on the army, I made it my mission, my goal in life, to keep other young men from dying senselessly on foreign soil. I wanted to save them from watching their friends blown to bits for reasons that had nothing to do with us or our country.”
“But surely you could come back now—even if you were a deserter. There was an amnesty, wasn’t there?” All her life she’d viewed her father as a hero. This lie her parents had lived made no sense, and she found Thomas’s story confusing.
“I did much more than desert.” He broke eye contact and lowered his head to stare at their joined hands. “As I said earlier, I joined a militant antiwar group. A number of us decided to blow up the ROTC building at the University of Kentucky. We didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt…. The security guard wasn’t supposed to be anywhere close to the building.”
“He died in the explosion?”
Her father nodded. “Two of our group were picked up almost immediately when they tried to cross the Canadian border. José and I knew it was only a matter of time before we’d be arrested, as well.”
“José?”
“José Delgado, a friend, a good one at the time. The two of us made our way into Mexico before an arrest warrant could be issued.”
“What happened to him?”
“José? We bummed around the country for a while, then he found another cause. We argued and split up—I haven’t seen him in years. The last I heard he was part of a guerrilla group somewhere in Central America.”
“But couldn’t you come back now? That happened almost thirty years ago!”
“No,” Thomas said with a sadness that couldn’t be disguised. “There’s no statute of limitations on murder. The minute I cross the border, I’ll be arrested for murder and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Raine, I want you to know that I was involved with the group, but I was against the bombing. I never believed violence was the way to get our message across. But I didn’t have the courage to stand up to the others. That was my greatest sin and one I’ve paid for dearly in the years since.”
“What happened to the two who were arrested?”
Again her father lowered his gaze. “Rick and Dan? Rick committed suicide in prison, and Ginny told me Dan was paroled after serving six years of a twelve-year sentence.”
Questions crowded Lorraine’s mind, and she asked the most pressing ones first. “Why didn’t Mom join you? Surely after five or ten years she could have done so without anyone suspecting.”
“That was what we planned in the beginning,” he said. “Your mother moved to Louisville and she visited me every six months or so. We were able to keep in touch through a mutual friend.”
“Who?”
