a stranger made it easier to talk about.
More words bubbled to the surface. “Would it just be you and Roberta, then? If . . .”
Sam took a deep breath, and I squeezed my eyes closed, wishing I could pull the words back in my mouth and swallow them down.
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “That’s none of my business.”
“Neither is Luther being sick, but that didn’t stop me.” While my brain chewed on this, he shifted beside me, scratching his ear. “It’s just me, Luther, and Roberta, yeah.”
I nodded in the darkness.
“As the story goes,” Sam continued, “a young woman from the Ukraine named Danya Sirko came to the States and found herself in New York.” Sam paused, and when I looked over, I caught his wry smile aimed at the sky. “Danya became the nanny to Michael and Allison Brandis’s three young children in Manhattan.”
I could feel him turn to look at me, waiting.
“Okay . . . ?”
Sam hesitated meaningfully. “Incidentally, Danya was also very beautiful, and Michael was not a faithful man.”
Realization settled in. “Oh. Danya is your mom, not Allison? Michael is your dad?”
“Yeah. He’s Roberta’s son. Luther’s stepson.” He laughed. “I was the dirty little secret, until my mother was deported—by Michael, sort of. I was two, and he wanted nothing to do with me, but Danya wanted me to be raised here. Luther and Roberta took me in when they should have been retiring and taking it easy.”
My stomach bottomed out. There he was, spilling the soap opera version of his family’s history, and I wasn’t even allowed to talk about mine. It felt unfair.
“I’m sorry.”
He laughed lightly at this. “Don’t be.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do. But I have to think it was worlds better to be with Luther and Roberta than Michael, even if that had been an option.”
“So . . . you don’t know your dad?”
“No.” Sam blew out a breath and arced a smile over at me. He let the confidence settle between us for a few quiet beats. “What about you?”
My heart slammed against my breastbone, and Nana’s stern warning expression was printed on the inside of my eyelids. This was where I always played my part: My dad died when I was a baby. I was raised by Nana and Mom.
But the thing was, I’d spent my whole life with the truth trapped in my throat. And with Sam’s enormous backstory out there between us, I didn’t want to lie again. “Me?”
Sam tapped his knee against mine, setting off an electrical storm along my skin. Even when he wasn’t touching me, it was impossible not to feel how close he was. “You.”
“I grew up mostly in Guerneville.” The truth rattled a cage inside my ribs. “It’s a super small town in Northern California. I’m moving to Sonoma for school—which isn’t very far.” I lifted my hands in a shrug and let a hint of the truth slip out: “I was raised by my mom and Nana.”
“No dad, either?”
I swallowed. The easy, familiar lie was right there, on the tip of my tongue—but I was under the London sky, thousands of miles from home, and a rebellious, impulsive flash streaked through me. This had always been such a bigger deal to Nana and Mom than it had ever been to me; why was I still protecting their story? “He sort of . . . fell away.”
“How does a dad fall away?”
I became aware, while I was lying beside this completely earnest stranger on a damp lawn, that it was weird that I’d never really talked about this. In part, I didn’t talk about it because I knew I wasn’t supposed to. And in part, because it was unnecessary: the one person in my life who learned about it—my best friend Charlie—watched the drama unfold in real time, in bite-sized servings that grew spaced farther and farther apart. I’d never needed to summarize it or spin it into a story. So why did I suddenly want to?
“My parents got divorced when I was eight,” I told him, “and Mom moved me back to her hometown. Guerneville.”
“Back from where?”
I peeked over the edge of this canyon, and I didn’t know what it was about that garden or Sam but I decided: fuck it. I was eighteen and it was my life, what’s the worst that could happen?
“LA,” I said.
I blinked in the direction of the hotel again as if I expected to see Nana racing toward us, shaking her fists.
Sam let out a