Bianca looked down and noticed what I was seeing. “You don’t like my nipples?”
“I like them very much. Too fucking much. I can’t concentrate while they’re taunting me.”
She laughed as though she thought I was amusing but then went to grab her bathrobe. I chugged my full glass of wine in the two minutes that she was gone. When she came back out wearing a sexy, red silk robe that was hanging open, I grabbed her glass and finished it off, too.
Seeing the two empty glasses, Bianca fastened her robe and sat. “Talk to me.”
I didn’t know where to begin. I took a deep breath, followed by a mental snapshot of her as if it was the last time I might ever see her, and then opened my mouth. “Your sister is the spitting image of my father.”
“How is this even possible?”
Dex raked his fingers through his hair. “I called my father after I left. He confirmed that the timeline could work. And that he never used protection.”
“You must be imagining it. Alexandra is so much like my father. They have the same mannerisms, the same sense of humor, they even hold the fork in the same exact odd way!”
“Those things are learned. Not genetic.”
“They both have bushy eyebrows.”
“That’s a fairly common trait. I’d venture to guess that afflicts half the population of Greece.”
“You’re wrong. You have to be wrong.”
Dex took his phone out of his pocket and hit a few buttons, then scrolled until he found whatever he was looking for. Turning it to face me, he extended it palm up. I could see he’d called up Facebook. “It’s my father’s page. Scroll through some of his pictures.”
I hesitated, but eventually curiosity won out. The first picture I landed on, almost stopped my heart. It was as if I was looking at a computer-generated picture of my sister turned into a man. It had to be a coincidence. I swiped again.
My sister’s eyes.
Swiped again.
Alexandra’s chin.
Swiped again.
Her smile. Alexandra’s beautiful smile. Tears welled in my eyes.
Dex reached out his hand and attempted to cover the phone to stop me from looking further. I knocked it away, needing to see more. I swiped and swiped…looking for some semblance of hope that all of the previous pictures were just a bad angle or something. But by the time I frantically reached the end of the pictures, tears were falling.
Dex dropped to his knees and knelt in front of me. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
He tried to hold me, offer me comfort, but I couldn’t let myself let go yet. I needed to know more. “Did your father know?”
“He claims to have had no idea.”
“Does my mother know the truth?”
“I don’t know.”
“She only started working there a year before Alexandra was born. What the hell did she do? Jump in bed with the boss the first chance she had?” I wasn’t really asking Dex a question, even though I had so many.
“I don’t know what really happened. My father was vague on all the details. Sadly, I got the impression it wasn’t because he was intentionally being ambiguous, but rather it was because having an ongoing affair was a regular occurrence for him during his marriage, and he can’t keep them all straight in his mind anymore.”
“I just don’t understand, Dex. How do you have a child that clearly looks like another man and move on? They just ended the affair after she got pregnant, and neither of them ever bothered to question paternity? Everyone just moved on with their lives?”
Dex squeezed my h