It was 10:30 AM when Julie spilled out of her Media Ethics class and caught the bus to the cafe to meet her half-brother. Half-brother. His very existence still seemed an impossibility to her.

Julie didn't want to like Nate. She wanted to hate him. She wanted him to somehow be the innocent scapegoat for all this turmoil that was gnawing her gut to pieces. He dressed the sheer alpha male, all business from head to toe, and he'd pulled up to cafe in a bright red sports car, so she thought it shouldn't be too hard to despise him. But, once they got talking, he was surprisingly unassuming. He seemed to have the gentleness of someone like Matt, the intelligence of a Landry, and the wry sense of humor of a Tyra.

Nate told her that he had grown up in Maryland. "My mom moved there before I was born, because she had a brother and a sister there who had families of their own." His aunts and uncles had helped to raise him, and his mother had worked her way from teaching to administration, until she was an assistant superintendent for the entire school district.

"You didn't have a dad?" Julie asked. Then she winced to think who his biological father was. "A stepdad, I mean?"

He shook his head. "She never got married."

Nate told Julie his mom used to leave the radio on in the house all the time when he was a kid, tuned to talk radio, and he would listen to this investment show droning on in the background. He devoured books on finance and invested his lawn mowing money. His mother let him take over her investments. When he was 18, his uncle hired him to work at his insurance agency so he could sponsor him to take some kind of financial exams, series something or another - Julie didn't follow all the details. Now, Nate was in business for himself.

"And you never went to college?" Julie asked. She hadn't yet finished her dual English and Journalism degree. She was working 25 hours a week, as a proofreader for the Chicago Sun-Times, and going to school part-time. She didn't know what she wanted to do with her degree, once she had it, but she knew she wanted to earn more than the $9.75 an hour she was earning now, and that she wanted to do something more interesting than inserting semicolons and crossing out unnecessary commas.

"No," Nate said, "But I sure took a lot of exams."

"So..." She glanced out the cafe window to where he had parked his car. "Are you, like, rich?"

"I'm not hurting for money," he said with a smile.

"You don't rip people off do you? You're not a hedge fund manager, are you?"

"I invest people's money for them and then take one percent of whatever I make for them. If they don't make money, I don't make money.

Julie poured another cream to cool her piping hot coffee. This was her second cup. "Who would trust a 23 year old with their money?"

"I started with people who knew me and saw what I had done for myself and my mom. I told her to get out before 2008, and I told her to buy again when the market bottomed out in 2009. She made a very impressive return over the next few years."

"And you inherited it?"

He cringed, and Julie regretted reminding him of his mother's recent death. "Yeah," he said, "but I'd already made a lot more on my own than I inherited. I started with my uncles and aunts and cousins as clients, but then they started referring me to their friends, who started referring me to their friends, and well...soon enough, I had all the clients I could want, including some with huge portfolios."

Julie wanted to ask just how much he had made, but she restrained herself. "So you're a financial guru. Was your mom a genius or something?"

"Why? Your dad isn't?"

Julie laughed. "Not by a long shot." Then her lips grew tight and a pain twisted her heart. She'd felt a moment of teasing affection for her father when she'd said those words, before she was reminded why Nate was here, sitting across from her. She was reminded of the awful thing her father had done.

"I'm sorry," Nate said softly when he saw her expression. "I know this must be weird for you."

It was beyond weird. It hurt.

"Have you talked to him?" Nate asked. "Your - our - father?"

She didn't like the way he kept saying our. "Not yet. I can't." She wrote a number on a napkin and slid it across the table to him. "But here's his cell phone number, if you want to."

Nate took hold of the napkin and stared at the number. "I know so little about him. I did some research. I found an article about him, in a sports magazine. I guess he is - or was - a really good football coach."

"Yeah," Julie muttered. "He still coaches." He was a good coach, even if he wasn't a good husband.

"I tried to see if I could connect with him on Facebook," Nate said, "but I couldn't find an account for him. Contacted a few Eric Taylors, but none were him."

"Yeah, my dad doesn't do social media."

"But you were mentioned in the article, and I was able to find you."

Julie shook her head. "I just don't understand this. How much did your mom tell you? How did they even meet?"

"My mom and your dad - our dad - worked together at the same school. He was my mom's student teacher."

Julie swallowed her coffee hard. It burned going down. This was even worse than she had thought. Was it some kind of Mrs. Robinson thing? Nate's mom had recently died of cancer. Cancer wasn't something that usually took out people her father's age, was it? "How old was she?"

"She wasn't old! She was only 24."

"Oh," Julie said, but the relief was only as if someone had removed the smallest weight from an enormously heavy barbell. She was still struggling beneath the truth.

"He was a senior in college," Nate said, "doing his teaching internship during his last semester."

Her parents would have just gotten married during her father's junior year. How could he! Julie pushed down the anger and tuned back into what Nate was saying.

"...told my mom that his wife had left him - "

"- I can't believe my mom would do that. She wouldn't just up and leave my dad without trying to work things out."

"Well apparently she did. And I don't how, exactly, but he and my mom ended up having an affair. But then your dad - our dad - said that his wife - your mom - was coming home, and he wanted to work things out with her, and that he couldn't see my mom ever again. He was three days away from finishing his student teaching. He quit early. Just didn't show up for work the next three days. She signed off on the internship papers anyway."

"You said your mom told my dad that she was on the pill when she wasn't. Why would she do that?"

"She wanted to get pregnant. She'd fallen for him even before the affair started, and she thought a pregnancy would...lock him down. In case your mom decided to come home, she thought, if she was pregnant, he'd leave your mom for her."

"Unbelievable," Julie muttered. She'd heard women sometimes got pregnant to "keep a man," but she didn't understand it. Her dad should have used a condom anyway, no matter what that teacher told him. Julie couldn't believe he'd been so irresponsible. No, he shouldn't have used a condom. He shouldn't have been in bed with her in the first place! Julie was having trouble wrapping her mind around this image of a much different man than the one she'd grown up knowing. "But then when she did get pregnant, she didn't even tell him?"

"He broke it off with her before she knew she was pregnant. My mom started to have second thoughts, to feel guilty for the affair. She decided that since he clearly wanted to save his marriage, she didn't want to ruin. So she didn't contact him. At the end of the school year, she moved to Maryland." Nate sighed. "It shocked me when she told me all this, because she wasn't that person. She was never that person in my eyes, who would do foolish things and have an affair with a married man and get pregnant to try to lock him down like that. She was a good mom. She worked hard. She did charity work in the summers. She raised me alone."

Julie looked into his troubled eyes. Nate must have been going through something like the emotional turmoil she'd been experiencing, the wild disconnect. She wasn't exactly alone in this experience.

Nate folded the napkin on which Julie had written down Coach Taylor's cell phone number and tucked it in his front shirt pocket. "Does she know?" he asked. "Your mom? About the affair?"

Julie hadn't talked to either of her parents since she'd found out yesterday, but – assuming her dad wasn't lying to Matt – "Yeah. She knows. And my husband told my dad about you, so I guess he'll be expecting your call."

"Maybe I shouldn't. I don't want to stir things up. They've been married a really long time. Clearly they got past it."

"Things have probably already been stirred up. My dad probably told her. They tell each other everything."

"Sounds like a good, honest marriage."

Julie snorted. "Yeah. I used to think they had the ideal marriage." She lowered her voice and muttered, "Guess I was wrong."

"People change," Nate said. "Relationships change."

She and Nate talked a little more – about their own lives – about music and books and movies – about anything other than the fact that their parents weren't always the people they believed them to be. Julie told him to keep in touch. He offered to drop her off at work at the Sun-Times on his way out of town.

Julie marveled at the car when she got inside. She'd found her car unnecessary in the city and had sold it to save money. She couldn't imagine ever owning anything like this.

"You compensating for something?" she teased as he pulled away from the curb. Then she wished she hadn't. Maybe he was compensating for the fact that he'd never had a father.

"If it makes you think I'm less of a douche," he said, "I did buy it at a charity auction."

She smiled, and so did he. She saw her father in his smile, and her own faded.