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interpreting her body language as a way of gauging
     her emotional well-being—Molly stared intently at Brick and searched for something, anything, of herself. Charmaine said their
     eyes were the same. A shadow of Molly’s dimple seemed visible on his cheek, and from his gym shorts Molly could tell they
     had the same runner’s quads. She wondered if his hair stuck up in the back as much as hers did in the mornings, and if he
     also liked strawberry Pop-Tarts better than actual strawberries. Was he allergic to pomegranates, too?
    The sheer force of her interest in the subject surprised her. Molly had never thought much about what it would be like to
     have a father. In fact, she’d never thought muchabout the one she’d believed she had. An orphaned college fling of Laurel’s who’d died in Iraq before Molly was born, Army
     Captain Hank Walker had been a picture painted only with words, because, as Laurel used to say, Molly was the only memento
     he’d left behind (which of course made a whole lot of sense
now
, given Laurel’s confession that he was actually an invention based on the novel she’d been reading when she went into labor).
     At first Molly had pressed for more details, but as she got older, Laurel’s answers got more vague, and her expression increasingly
     sad and remote. So Molly stopped asking. And after a while, she stopped wondering. Aside from the odd curiosity brought on
     from watching the neighborhood dads play catch with their kids, Molly had never felt anything lacking in her life—especially
     because her grandmother Ginger had enough stern looks and abstinence lectures in her arsenal to raise sixty teenagers. But
     here was this big bear of a man, grinning broadly at the camera, seeming familiar to her in a way she’d never noticed before.
     It was tangible, breathing proof that her tastes, her eyebrow furrow, or the fact that her big toe always seemed twice as
     big as it should be had an origin outside Laurel’s DNA.
    Molly’s eyes stung. Thinking about her mother was like slamming her hand in a car door: It hurt too much to consider doing
     it on purpose. She especially didn’t want to dwell on how Laurel had almost chosen to die without telling Molly that her father
     was arguably the most famous movie star in the world. Focusing on
that
made Molly kindof angry at Laurel, and then she felt terrible for being angry, and then she resented feeling terrible….
    The memory came anyway: Laurel setting aside her ever-present knitting needles and beckoning for Molly to sit next to her
     on the bed, her face almost lost beneath her favorite chemo turban. It was exactly thirty-two days before she took her last
     breath.
    “I’m so sorry,” she’d said as her opening gambit. “I lied. I’m selfish, and I lied. Here, I knitted you another scarf. It’s
     green. I love you in green.”
    The story poured out of her mother like she’d turned on a faucet, and the scarf hadn’t helped Molly absorb it any faster:
     how Laurel had fallen in love on set; how she’d discovered she was pregnant after the actor had married someone else; how
     she’d moved home and had Molly and then, impossibly, kept quiet about this whole incredibly dramatic series of events.
    Afterward, Molly spent the entire night staring at her bedroom ceiling, trying to put herself in Laurel’s place and wondering
     how it was possible that her free-spirited, bubbly mother, who never had a thought she didn’t blurt out, could’ve spent the
     last sixteen years holding on to the most mammoth secret Molly could imagine. Her father was
Brick Berlin
? Whom she’d just seen on
Access Hollywood
talking about a fund-raiser for hearing-impaired dogs? How was it possible that one minute you could be giggling at someone
     for mispronouncing the words
cochlear implants
, and the next, be that person’s daughter? And how could
anyone
refrain from sharing something that monumental, that crazy, at the first opportunity?