Jo braced herself as she took what he put out once again. This time, the photograph was in color, and the years showed on that once unlined face. Not that the woman wasn’t attractive—and she still had the thick brown hair. But the eyes remained shadowed and there was still that tension around the mouth and the brow.
“What’s her name?”
“Shelley. Shelley Manello.”
When Jo returned the phone to him, he stared at the picture, something in his expression shifting.
“I don’t have to meet her,” Jo said through a tight throat. “I don’t want to cause any problems.”
“No. I would never keep the two of you apart.”
“So what’s wrong?” Jo closed her eyes and shook her head again. “You don’t have to answer that.”
“Hey, siblings, right?” His dark brows lowered even further. “And I’m just trying to remember.”
“What?”
“When she was pregnant with you.” Manny looked up sharply. “I am not doubting anything you said. I just . . . going by how old you are, I’d have been out of the house and in college, but you’d think I’d recall. Or that later, she would have told me about it.”
Jo fixated on the back of the phone as he focused on the front. In the silence, unease trickled down the back of her neck, like ice-cold water dripping from some kind of height.
What if Bill had been wrong with his research?
Her dread that that might be the case told her how much she wanted to be Manny’s sister. It was funny how this stranger had made her feel so grounded. Especially given that Syn had left the room.
“But you know,” Manny said, “things were tight for Mom and I back then. From day one, she’d been bound and determined that I was going to go to medical school and I was going to become a surgeon and I was going to be somebody. She was a nurse, and she was always taking extra shifts to afford my education. My main memory of her from my childhood was of how tired she always was. If she happened to have gotten pregnant again when I was away at school? I mean . . . there was no way she could afford to keep it given my costs.” He winced. “You, rather. Keep you. Sorry. I feel like I’m—”
“Don’t ever apologize. I’m the disrupter, not you. Besides . . . maybe she didn’t want to be pregnant with me.” As his eyes lifted to hers, Jo pictured the image of that haunted face. “Maybe it wasn’t that it was an unintended pregnancy. Maybe it was the result of . . .”
She couldn’t say it.
But given the way Manny squeezed his eyes shut, she didn’t have to.
“We could be half-siblings,” she suggested sadly. “Maybe Robert Bluff was not my father. Maybe . . . it was someone else.”
Manny rubbed his face.
“It would explain why she never wanted to tell you about me,” Jo said hoarsely.
Jo unhinged her arm lock and removed the cotton ball and the tape. Beneath the white puff, there was just the smallest of marks, a red dot that was already healing in her skin.
The idea that she had been worse than a mistake . . . that she might have been from some kind of sexual violence? That she could well have been something her mother had tried to abort and failed?
As tears came to Jo’s eyes, she looked around for something to wipe them away with.
Manny was the one who delivered the Kleenex to her, reaching to the counter and then extending the tissue box across the space that separated them.
And then he was getting up, and coming over. Hopping onto the exam table with her, he put a strong arm around her shoulders and pulled her in close.
“I am so sorry . . .” she said as she started to sob over the suffering of a woman she had never met.
On the other side of the exam room’s door, Syn sat on the concrete floor of the training center’s corridor. After Manny had properly stitched him up, he had stepped out, ostensibly to give the siblings privacy. In reality, he had needed time to think.
And then he’d heard every word Jo said. Every single one.
As she spoke about the circumstances of her birth—or what she feared might have happened—he knew what the answer to her question about feeding had to be.