CNN to come up. It was the default channel during election season. The image filled the screen. She dropped the remote.
Her own face stared back at her. It was her faculty picture. The unflattering one where her blond hair looked lifeless, her blue eyes tired and her cheeks paler than the white background. It was her post-breakup face, the face of a woman who’d been lied to by someone she loved, cheated out of her much-deserved faculty position and forced to start over at a new college. One bad media story had done that to her. Three years had passed, and Kat was not that woman anymore.
The volume was too low, so she searched the floor with trembling hands for the remote and turned it up, stabbing at the buttons until she could hear the announcer.
“...and we’ll come back to this developing story.” Her picture disappeared and they went to commercial.
She let out a scream of frustration.
“Are you okay?” the professor next door called through the thin walls. She forced a breath into her lungs.
“Yes, sorry,” she mustered. While her colleagues seemed nice enough, she wasn’t close with any of them. That was a mistake she wasn’t going to make again.
“It’s understandable.”
Kat went behind her desk and turned on the ancient computer. The boot-up screen was maddeningly slow. She didn’t have a smartphone—an expense forgone because of the cost of the data plan on top of the pricey device. Once she got a promotion, she would treat herself to a tablet computer.
She punched in her log-in and password, keeping an eye on CNN. They were still on a commercial break. As soon as she was logged in, she opened the internet browser, which went straight to CNN’s politics page. A yelp escaped her lips as she saw her picture, that same ugly faculty photo, load on the page.
Katerina Driscoll—Senator Roberts’s Secret Daughter the headline screamed. Her eyes widened. She read through the article as quickly as she could, needing to blink several times when the words blurred before her. She flipped open her dated phone and called home. It rang and rang, and she swore under her breath. The mood stabilizer she gave her mother sometimes knocked her out.
This can’t be true. Or could it? Her mother had mentioned that her father was a politician. Her mouth soured as she read the article. She knew Senator Roberts. Correction—she knew him the way a professor knows a subject, having lectured on the three-term US Congress senator from Virginia five times in the past month alone. He was in a tough reelection battle because he was proposing a bill to spend billions of dollars on Improvised Explosive Device, or IED, identification technology for overseas troops. The normally boring congressional election had taken the national stage since its outcome would determine the majority party in the closely held Senate. It had been an exciting few weeks for the tiny political-science department at her small-town Virginia college.
CNN came back and repeated the headline she’d just read online. It seemed the first story had appeared a little over an hour ago. Her heart pounded in her ears, muffling the words of the TV announcer. She fingered the pendant on her necklace and took short breaths to calm the sharp pain in her chest. This couldn’t be happening. Not on this day.
Why do they think I’m his daughter? She flipped open her phone and called the house again. Maybe the ringing would wake her mother.
None of the articles mentioned her mother’s name; all that came up was an obscure reference to a “short-lived previous marriage.”
This had to be some horrible case of mistaken identity. She picked up her purse and checked her watch. Two hours until the committee would meet about her promotion. The only way to set this straight was to go home and rouse her mother.
The TV screen caught her eye and she gasped. A new picture appeared, one from just moments ago in the lecture hall. A scrolling Twitter feed showed next to it.
VA professor said daddy isn’t the smartest. #SecretDaughter
Prof Driscoll thinks @SenatorRoberts blew it. #SecretDaughter
The scrolling text was too fast to read. She went back to the computer and brought up her Twitter account. The hashtag was new, obviously being used in all the Tweets related to the story. When she typed #SecretDaughter into the search box, it brought up over a thousand Tweets, including a bunch from her students who were supposed to be writing an exam. There were at least ten photos of her standing in front of the class looking like a deer caught in the headlights. If possible, those images were even uglier than the faculty photo. Every crease on her tailored shirt showed, and her pencil skirt appeared to be a size too small against her newly gained five pounds. Her sensible flat shoes, good for traversing the campus, made her look short.
She struggled to take a breath but all the oxygen in the room had been sucked out. This wasn’t just some small media story. It was big-time news, and she was right in the middle of it. She stood on shaky legs. The only way to put a stop to all this was to talk to her mother. She couldn’t even call the CNN desk and yell at them for spreading lies. Her birth certificate, and every form she’d ever completed, had a blank next to her father’s name. He was a figment of Kat’s imagination, a man she’d created to fill her mother’s silence.
Could the news story be true? She shook her head. Senator Roberts was a public figure, and if he was her real father, someone would have mentioned it. The only person who could refute this nightmare was her bipolar mother, who was sleeping off a manic episode. She closed her eyes, took a fortifying breath and stepped out of her office. And ran right into a solid mass. She stepped back.
“Dean... Gl-Gladstone,” she stammered. The dean was an imposing man in his sixties with gray hair and a broad chest. He was well over six feet and used every inch of his height to rule the faculty. She had interacted with him only in group settings, preferring to deal with the dean through the department chief, who didn’t have a notorious temper and didn’t fire staff for sneezing the wrong way.
Dean Gladstone took up nearly all the space in the tiny foyer-slash-anteroom-slash-coffee-station. They didn’t have a receptionist; they barely had working phones.
“Professor Driscoll, I need a word with you.”
“Of...of course.” She waved him into her tiny office, wishing she had tidied up. Stacks of papers littered her desk. He strode in and took a seat. His huge frame looked comical in the tiny, threadbare visitor’s chair. Kat put down her purse and sat, keeping her back as straight as she could.
“There are reporters and news vans outside this building, harassing students, asking if they know you,” he said without preamble.
“What?” No one had been there when she’d walked in just twenty minutes ago.
“I have guards escorting them to the campus gates, where our jurisdiction ends. I’ve had to request more security.”
Kat swallowed. How was she going to get out of here?
The dean continued in a dramatic, gravelly voice. “Now, I’ve come to tell you that this school does not welcome such publicity shenanigans. You should have disclosed you were the senator’s daughter when you applied for your position here.”
She put her hands on her lap so he wouldn’t see them tremble. “Dean, I have no idea why they published that story. I don’t know my father—he left before I was born.” Her voice was tinnier than she wanted, but at least she’d managed to keep it steady.
“Surely
