A woman says my father had another daughter

Dear Delyara, A woman messaged me yesterday saying she believes my father was also her father. He died four years ago. She is forty-one, three years younger than me. She sent photographs of herself, and I can see him in her face. The same deep-set eyes. The same crooked little finger. My mother says the woman is lying. She became so angry that she refused to look at the photographs. The woman says she does not want money and has known his name since childhood. She only wants medical history and perhaps to meet us. I keep switching between suspicion and an absurd tenderness toward a stranger who may share half my blood. If she is telling the truth, my father carried another family secret through every birthday, holiday, and lecture he gave me about honesty. If she is wrong, I risk hurting my mother for nothing. I looked through old calendars tonight, searching for trips Father took around the year she was conceived, as if one weekend absence could turn uncertainty into fact. The dead are very difficult to question.