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myself, then exhaled again. Inhaled. Deep and slow. “When?” I asked, forcing the word out of my mouth.
    Del didn’t answer and, for a second, I thought she was going to deny it, was going to try to bluff her way out of it. Instead she closed her eyes for a moment, swallowed hard, then faced me. “Long time ago,” she whispered, her eyes never leaving mine. “Long, long time ago. Way long time ago.”
    The breath caught in my chest again and I inhaled to try to get it moving, but my body was immobile. Frozen. Nothing would go in, nothing would come out, it hurt too much. “How long?”
    “Once. Only the once.”
    Tears pricked behind my eyes and my jaw muscles clenched into a tight ball. I didn’t feel like crying but the moistness in my eyes, the pain in my jaw said I was about to bawl my eyes out.
    Del sat up, ran her slender fingers through her hair, used the palms of her hands to rub at her wet eyes.
    “Only the once,” she repeated.
    Once. Only the once. The words didn’t have any meaning. Did once make it any better than twice? Or fifty times? It was done between them. Was it less wrong because it was once? I blinked but my vision was still blurred by tears.
    Why?
I asked her silently.
    Del sat hunched forward on the sofa, elbows rested on her knees, hands in her hair, staring at the laminate flooring.
    Why?
I asked again in my head.
    She continued to stare at the floor, obviously not hearing my telepathic questions. Lost in her own thoughts and her own world. A world where she’d confessed. Then she lifted her eyes, glanced at the picture of Tegan that sat on top of the television before returning her gaze to the floor.
    It was an instinctive thing, a little thing that gave everything away. “No,” I gasped, more to myself than to her. I was trying to convince myself I was being ridiculous; that my heart had skipped several beats for nothing.
    Del’s head snapped round to me as she heard my gasp. My eyes darted from Del to the photo to Del. Our eyes locked and her face drained of color.
    I shook my head, trying to dislodge the thought, trying to remove the very idea from my mind. My eyes flew back to the picture. From that smiling snapshot, Tegan’s nose was a dead giveaway. She was Nate’s child.
    Everything fell into place, like the final pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces had been there all along, of course, I simply hadn’t seen them. Hadn’t seen the bigger picture until that moment. Now I knew why Tegan looked so familiar. It wasn’t because she was her mother’s double, which she was in most ways, it was because she had the same ski-slope nose as her father, the shape of his large eyes, his sardonic twist of the lip. I’d seen those features all along, but my mind hadn’t made the connection.
    I’d asked Del who the father was when she first found out she was pregnant. She’d tearfully told me that it’d been an accident, that he wasn’t around, that he was a married man she’d met through work.
    “Bastard,” I’d hissed.
    “No,” she’d replied. “He didn’t mean for it to happen. Neither did I, it was an accident. No one’s to blame.”
    Every conversation we’d had about the father of her baby whizzed through my head: every time she said he wasn’t capable of loving her, let alone a child; how she’d repeated that it was a mistake—the best thing that had happened to her, but still a mistake; all those hours she’d declared she didn’t need the father messing her life up. And there was me, the surrogate father. The one who went to antenatal classes, who’d been in the delivery room almost gagging at what I saw, who helped out as much as I could—all the while encouraging her to tell the daddy because it was morally right, that even if she didn’t want him to know, he had a right. He had to earn his bastard stripes by rejecting her and the child. And, I often said, Tegan might want to know. “What are you going to tell her then? That you didn’t want him to