Rising Tides by Emilie Richards

same?”
    “Look, I’m not in the mood for this, okay? I don’t care what color you are. It has nothing to do with me.”
    “Now that’s where you’re wrong.”
    She opened her mouth to defend herself, but didn’t. Suddenly she suspected that she and Phillip weren’t talking about the same thing at all. He moved over a little, almost as if he were inviting her to sit beside him.
    She joined him on the hood. Now they were both staring at the house.
    “You were waiting for me, weren’t you?” she said.
    “I’m waiting for a whole lot of things.”
    “Did Ben tell you about the letters?”
    “Yeah.” Phillip tossed another volley of crumbs to thesparrows. As he did, a gold band on his left hand glinted in the sunlight.
    “I didn’t realize you were married,” she said.
    “And I’ll be a father any day now. Belinda’s waiting back in New Orleans. So I have my own reasons to get this over with. That’s why I’m sitting here right now.”
    “What was your connection to my grandmother, Phillip?”
    There was a pause before he spoke. “The same as yours.”
    She tried to figure out what he meant. She had had many connections to her grandmother. Aurore had been her teacher, her friend, her champion. Dawn looked sideways to ask him to clarify. He was gazing at her, and waiting…. Then she understood. “She was—”
    He nodded. “My grandmother, too.”
    Seconds passed. “I don’t believe it,” she said at last.
    “That doesn’t surprise me.”
    “What are you trying to say, Phillip? That your mother…” She paused and tried again. “That Nicky—?”
    “Nicky is Aurore’s daughter. But Nicky doesn’t know.” Phillip rubbed the back of his neck. “She will soon enough, though. And I’m going to have to be the one to tell her. Our grandmother was a great one for get ting other people to do the things she didn’t want to do herself.”
    “How in the hell do you know all of this?”
    “Aurore took her time dying. She had plenty of time to prepare. And telling me who I am was part of it. The truth came out a little at a time. She said she was hiring me to write her life story. I thought it was an old lady’s whimsy, and I humored her because I needed an excuse to stay in the city. Then I realized it was my story she was telling, too.”
    Dawn thought about the letters she’d read. “But I don’tunderstand. She left me letters from my great-grandfather to a priest, but they don’t have anything to do with you.”
    “Don’t they?”
    “I don’t see what. They’re about a hurricane, way back at the turn of the century—”
    “Did you understand what you read?”
    “Some, but not why it’s so important.”
    His gaze passed over her face, as if he were searching for something that until now he had found lacking. “Do you want to know more?”
    Dawn was still trying to deal with what she’d just learned. Her grandmother had had a daughter. One she had never acknowledged. One of a different race. And that daughter was here now, waiting to be told the truth. Dawn chanted a long string of words she hadn’t learned from her mother.
    “Well, we agree on that much,” Phillip said.
    “Are you going to elaborate?”
    “When Lucien Le Danois married your great-grand mother, he got more than a wife. He was from a good family with no money, and Claire Friloux was the heiress to Gulf Coast Steamship. When they married, Lucien moved up in the world considerably.”
    Phillip certainly had her full attention now. And so far the story sounded familiar. “Go on.”
    “The marriage wasn’t happy. Claire was pregnant for most of it, but your grandmother was the only child who survived infancy. And Aurore wasn’t expected to live into adulthood. The family came here in the summers, to get away from the heat and disease in the city. Lucien would leave Aurore and her mother on the island and come back and visit when he could. But they weren’t the only ones he visited. He found a lady friend in a