Somewhere there was another little girl

One she’d carried in her womb. She’d made so many promises to that baby as she dreamed of the future. She’d sung to her and laughed and tickled her own belly whenever a tiny toe or elbow surfaced.

But, through no fault of her own, she hadn’t kept those promises. Her baby had never heard her voice again. Someone else had taken her home. Did these other parents love her and sing to her and tickle her toes?

“If only…” Lynn breathed soundlessly. If only she could know. See that this other little girl was loved and cared for, read to and hugged, see that her artwork was on the refrigerator for all to admire.

But how could she ever find out, without contacting the hospital and telling them? Without taking the chance of losing Shelly?

That was the torment. Risk the little girl who was the center of her life for the one who couldn’t possibly remember her voice?

Lynn closed her eyes on a soft agonized exhalation. Risk her? How could she?

But how could she not?

Dear Reader,

I’m sure it won’t surprise you to hear that the idea for Whose Baby? came to me when I was reading about the recent case in which it was discovered that two little girls had been switched at birth. All of us, I’m sure, were transfixed when reading about this horrifying mistake. I’ll bet every parent thought immediately “What if…” Perhaps our deepest instinct is to protect our children. And yet…which child? If I found out one of my daughters wasn’t biologically mine, I’d feel no less fiercely protective, no less loving. And yet…I could so easily come to feel the same about the child I’d carried for nine months.

Any time I read or hear about something so emotional, the writer part of me kicks in and also wonders “What if…” What if the hero had lost his wife, and their biological child is all he has left of her? What if the heroine fears he wants both girls? Talk about conflict!

I don’t know that I’ve ever written a story with so many layers of painful and exhilarating emotion. Sitting in front of the computer each day, I felt as if I were unwrapping a gift from someone I’d loved and lost. Each layer was poignant, making me grateful for my own family.

See if you don’t feel the same!

Best,

Janice Kay Johnson

Whose Baby?
Janice Kay Johnson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Whose Baby?

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

O + O DOES NOT = B. So why was she even nervous?

Oblivious to the salt-scented breeze and the familiar whoosh of the broken surf, Lynn Chanak stared at the envelope in her hand. Open it, she told herself. Then you can quit worrying about nothing.

And nothing was just what it would prove to be.

That Portland lab had mixed up somebody else’s blood with Shelly’s. It was dumb to let the results shake her even for a minute. Poor Shelly had had to endure being stuck with a needle again, which still made Lynn mad, but it was done, over with, and now with the results from the new lab she’d be able to refute her ex-husband’s ridiculous accusation.

There was no way a second lab would make the same kind of mistake. Lynn and Brian both had Type O blood; heaven help her, she’d once been foolish enough to think that meant they were made for each other.

With both parents having Type O blood, Shelly had to have the same.

So why not open the envelope?

“Mama!” Lynn’s three-and-a-half-year-old daughter tugged at her sleeve. “See what I found?”

The small hand cupped a flame-red, wave-polished chunk of agate that beachcombing tourists would have killed for.

Lynn smiled in delight and hugged her daughter. “That’s a pretty one! You’ve got sharp eyes!”

She sat on a gray, winter-tossed log on the beach, the pile of mail in her hand. This was a daily ritual for her and Shelly when the shop was closed. Wait for the mail, don sweatshirts against the sharp breeze, and then walk the two blocks from home to the rocky beach, famous for the sea stacks that reared offshore. Otter Beach had been a tiny lumber town until the Oregon coast became a favorite tourist destination. Now streets were lined with art galleries and antique shops, and prime beachfront real estate was taken by inns and bed-and-breakfasts.

Lynn’s bookstore was one block over from the main street. The upstairs of the old house was home, the downstairs her business. During tourist season, she stayed open six days a week. By the time winter storms pounded the coast, she only bothered to open from Thursday through Sunday for locals and for the few hardy souls who came for romantic weekends and beachcombing after storms deposited Japanese floats and agates on the shore.

“I’ll give this to Daddy next time he comes,” Shelly announced. “C’n you save it for him, Mommy?”

“You bet, sweetie,” agreed Lynn, hiding her dismay. How was she going to explain to a three-year-old why Daddy wasn’t visiting anymore?

Giggling, Shelly wormed her hand into the pocket of Lynn’s faded, zip-front sweatshirt to deposit her find. The chunk of agate joined the crab claw and the mussel shell entwined with dried seaweed that she’d already collected.

For a moment Lynn watched as Shelly wandered away. She looked so cute in her denim overalls and rubber-toed sneakers, her mink-brown ponytail straight and sleek. Lynn tried hard to see what Brian did, but how could she? This was her daughter.

So what if her own hair was a warm, wavy chestnut-brown, if Brian was blond? So what if Shelly’s eyes were brown, while Lynn’s were green and Brian’s blue? Kids didn’t always look just like their parents. In fact, they hardly ever did. The genes that created a person were like…like the threads of color in a Persian carpet, thousands of bits of wool, woven together with a complexity that defied any ability to say that a certain blue came from such and such a sheep. Shelly might look like some forgotten great-grandmother. Did it matter that her face wasn’t a reflection of her father’s?

Apparently it did to Brian. He’d always been unreasonably jealous, both before they were married—when Lynn considered possessiveness romantic—and after. The marriage had been a mistake, a terrible mistake. Guilt ate at Lynn every time she thought about Brian, because she knew the failure was hers. She shouldn’t have married him. He was right, when he had believed she didn’t love him enough.

But she had never been unfaithful. There hadn’t been another man; probably never would be, now that she knew she wasn’t capable of the kind of passion a lifetime commitment required. She hadn’t given Brian any reason to suspect she was seeing anyone, so it outraged her that now he should claim Shelly wasn’t his.

Lynn bitterly resented having to put a three-year-old through the scary process of having blood drawn, but she’d done it. Not just because she needed Brian to keep paying the child support, but also because Shelly needed her dad.

So why wasn’t she tearing open the envelope? Lynn wrenched her gaze from Shelly, crouched on her heels ten yards down the beach staring with intense fascination at something, and studied the return address on the envelope. McElvoy Laboratories, Seattle, Washington.

A different lab. Lynn hadn’t taken Shelly back to their regular clinic for the second blood draw. She’d driven to Lincoln City. Of course she should have marched back into their doctor’s office, waving that stupid piece of paper and proclaiming her indignation at the mistake. She shouldn’t have had to pay for the second round of analysis. But she’d felt…cautious.

She made a face. Gun-shy. Brian had made her paranoid. She didn’t want to give him any ammunition. If he knew about the first results, he wouldn’t believe the second ones. He’d want more, instead of accepting the truth when she handed it to him.

Anyway, a voice whispered, what if it wasn’t a mistake? Shelly doesn’t look like either parent.

“Oh, right!” she said out loud. For Pete’s sake, she’d been awake and present during her awful labor. Sure, because of the hemorrhaging, she hadn’t seen her newborn daughter for the first hours, but then they’d laid the tiny red-faced baby at her breast, and she’d held her and loved her ever since. And, damn it, so had Brian! Only, now he had to get suspicious. Or cheap. He was late sometimes with the child-support check. Think what a good excuse this would be not to pay at all!

Lynn glanced up again; her daughter was in the exact same spot. A miniature tide pool, probably. Shelly had learned not to take living creatures from them, only to observe. She’d seen the difference between the rich color of a sea star clinging to a rock beneath the water and the dull hard body of a dead preserved one. She loved the scamper of tiny crabs, the dart of brown sandpipers, the hoarse roar of sea lions on the rocks offshore. This was home, magical and familiar at the same time.

Like having a child. For fleeting moments, Lynn saw through her daughter’s eyes and became three years old again. Wondering, awed, frightened, reassured by simple comforts.

Other times, Lynn was perplexed by this complete, small person her daughter seemed to be. It was as if she’d been born whole, finished, and all Lynn could do was open the world to her. The idea that a parent could shape her child was as silly as believing the same blood type meant two people were mysteriously akin.

Open it.

Lynn couldn’t understand her reluctance. She kept fingering that damned envelope. She’d peeked at all the bills, even flipped through a couple of publishers’ catalogs as if their spring lists mattered more than the blood that traced pale blue lines beneath the translucent skin of her daughter’s wrists, that beaded crimson when Shelly skinned her knee. Lifeblood.

Still Shelly crouched in the same spot, her attention span astonishing for a child her age. She didn’t need her mom right now, except as home base. A pocket and a smile and a hug.

Lynn tore open the envelope and pulled out the single sheet of paper. Unfolded it, and stared down at the bald black letter B. There was more, but she didn’t see it.

Her heart pounded so hard she wouldn’t have heard Shelly scream. Her vision misted, and she had the eerie sensation of being alone on the beach after a late-afternoon fog had rolled in. Everything was gray, indistinct, abruptly looming in front of her and then swallowed behind her.

Oh God, oh God, oh God.

There had been no other man. Only Brian, ever. If Brian wasn’t the father of Shelly Schoening, then she—Lynn—wasn’t her mother, either.

How was that possible?

She moaned and hugged her knees. How?

She could think of only one answer. Somehow, two babies had been switched in the hospital. The little girl laid to nurse at her breast wasn’t the one she’d carried for nine months. Her own baby had been given to another mother.

Somewhere, a toddler with bright blue eyes like Brian’s or chestnut-brown hair like Lynn’s called another woman Mommy.

Lynn whimpered again.

“Mommy?”

Swallowing her terror, Lynn looked into Shelly’s frightened brown eyes. “Yes, honey?” She sounded only a little hoarse.

“Is Mommy sick?”

To death. Her whole world was her daughter. Not that unknown child somewhere, the one who might look like her, but this child—the one she’d nursed and diapered, whose toes she’d tickled and counted, the one who squeezed her hand and waited for an answer.

“No,” she said. “Yes. Mommy’s tummy felt funny for a minute. Like this.” She burrowed her hand inside the OshKosh overalls and tickled until Shelly’s elfin face crinkled with a giggle.

Shelly wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck and pressed her cold, plump cheek against Lynn’s. “I wanna cheeseburger,” she confided. “And chocolate milk.”

Lynn hugged back. Hugged until the toddler squeaked with alarm.

“You know what?” Lynn said. “A cheeseburger sounds good to me, too. And chocolate milk. What do you say we go home?”

Shelly nodded vigorously. Lynn rose from the log, feeling as stiff as an old woman. She collected her pile of mail and took her daughter’s small hand. Feeling numb, she turned her back on the waves, her sneakered feet accustomed to the way the beach stones and sand gave with each step. One forward, half back. A struggle that strengthened the body.

Her daughter chattered. Lynn heard not a word, although she smiled and agreed.

She focused passionately on only one thought: Shelly was hers. Nobody must ever know that maybe, somehow, she wasn’t.

After lunch, while Shelly napped, Lynn sat at the kitchen table and convinced herself that Brian couldn’t insist on this blood work. She’d give up the child-support money first, tell him he could think what he liked. Even agree that he was right, although she hated the idea of letting him believe she’d sneaked around and had sweaty sex with some man she hardly knew—because, after all, she had no real friends who were male.

It took until five o’clock for Lynn to get angry. She put water on to boil for macaroni and went to check on Shelly. She was curled at one end of the shabby velveteen couch watching Dumbo for the thousandth time. Her flowered flannel blanket was tucked under one arm and her thumb was in her mouth. On the dentist’s advice, Lynn had been trying to break her of sucking her thumb, but tonight she didn’t say anything, just kissed the silky top of Shelly’s head and breathed in her essence before going back to the kitchen.

Things like babies getting switched in the hospital didn’t happen! she thought incredulously, then more firmly. Parents were always afraid they would, but hospitals took such precautions these days. Lynn still had the plastic band that had been around Shelly’s plump wrist when she was released from the hospital. It had exactly matched Lynn’s.

No. There had to be some other explanation.

This lab was wrong, too?

She poured the macaroni into the boiling water and frowned.

Wait! Could Brian have lied about his blood type? She stirred the macaroni and tried to remember. Had she said what hers was first? It would be like him to try to create a fiction to make it sound as though they were destined for each other. He’d wanted her from the first time they’d met, in the bookstore where she’d worked after she graduated from college.

Closing her eyes, Lynn tried to replay the scene. A popular professor at the university had been in a car accident, and the English department had held a blood drive. She’d been resting after giving a pint, when the nurse pushed back the curtain and said, “If you’ve finished your juice, you’re all set!”

And there Brian was, on the next gurney. Still lying down, he’d turned his head and grinned. “Hey, they’ve been sucking blood out of you, too, huh?”

He’d come into the bookstore for the first time just the previous weekend. Or, at least, she’d noticed him for the first time. And how could she not have noticed him? He was six feet two inches, with short sun-streaked blond hair and bright blue eyes. He was tanned from skiing at Mount Hood. She’d asked, because it was winter and most people in Portland were pale. He looked like a surfer, broad shouldered and athletic and golden.

“Well, it was voluntary,” she’d said shyly.

“Yeah, so they say.” He waved away the orange juice and sat up without taking it slowly. How like a man!

Somehow they ended up walking out together. And…yes! He’d asked, “What type blood do you have?”

She did volunteer the information first. She distinctly remembered the way he’d turned and said, so seriously, “That means the same blood runs through our veins. We must be meant for each other.”

She’d made it a joke; they’d both laughed, but a small thrill had run through her at the idea, presented with the intensity and gravity of a marriage proposal.

The more fool her!

She dumped the macaroni into the waiting colander, jumping when the boiling water splashed her hand. She should have known better. The single, chipped porcelain sink was shallow, and she was always careful.

Tears sprang to her eyes. “Damn, damn, damn,” she muttered, turning on the cold water and sticking her hand under it.

Why, that creep! All this anguish, and he’d lied!

She told herself she was furious, but really relief flooded her in a sweet tide. Such a simple explanation! And after she’d come up with such a convoluted one.

The relief lasted all evening. She played Chutes and Ladders with Shelly, then told silly stories and every knock-knock joke she could think of at bedtime, buoyed by that wash of exquisite release from fear.

She thought about calling him, the scumbag, and saying, “I might think about checking our daughter’s blood type, if I knew what yours really is.”

But, although she should be madder than she was, Lynn still thought she should cool down before she confronted him. Besides, she wanted to be sure of herself.

She could ask his mother. No, better yet, she could call the blood bank and say that he’d been in a car accident, and she didn’t remember his blood type but she knew he’d donated.

That was the moment when she remembered. There she was, checking to be sure the bathroom door was open enough to cast light into the hall so Shelly wouldn’t get scared if she woke up later. One part of Lynn’s mind thought, six inches, that’s perfect, and another part was wondering if she shouldn’t add more books on tape to her stock downstairs—a man, a tourist, had asked for them Sunday, and left without buying anything after looking at what she did have—and oh yes, she had to pick up peanut butter at the store tomorrow, since Shelly practically lived on it.

Through all her other preoccupations, she felt the onset of fear and the prickle of goose bumps on her skin even before a memory came to her. A woman from the blood bank had called, not long after Lynn and Brian got married, and she’d asked Lynn to encourage her husband to donate blood again.

“He’s got Type O, you know,” she said, “and we’re terribly short.”

Lynn had said helpfully, “My blood is O, too,” and she’d promised she would ask Brian, but she’d definitely come down to the blood bank herself. She had, and he must have, too, after work, not romantically together this time. That part didn’t matter; what did was that the blood bank had specifically wanted him to come in because he had O.

Instead of going to bed, Lynn felt her way back along the narrow hall to the kitchen, with its tiny refrigerator so old she had to regularly defrost the freezer part, the linoleum with the pattern worn to a blur, the brand-new shiny white stove, bought when the old one gave up the ghost at the worst possible moment, the way it always went. In the brightness when she switched on the light, the cheery yellow she’d painted the cabinets looked garish, a disguise as obvious as a clown’s red nose.

The living quarters of the house were crummy; she’d put all her money into the downstairs, the bookstore. She’d had to. She and Shelly could make do, Lynn had told herself. Until the store became really profitable. If bookstores ever did.

But now she couldn’t help looking around and imagining what other people would think. If, for example, Shelly’s real, biological parents were trying to take her back.

I wouldn’t look very good, would I? Lynn thought. Her knees crumpled, and she sank onto one of the two mismatched chairs that went with the tiny, scarred Formica and metal kitchen table. I don’t have much to offer Shelly materially, and I’m divorced, and my ex-husband thinks I must have cheated on him.

Those other parents, they could take Shelly away from her. She remembered a photo from some horrible child custody case, when the little boy was screaming and reaching for the only parents he’d ever known while the biological father carried him away. How painfully easy it was to transpose faces: she was the one trying to be brave, make this seem like the right thing, while Shelly was ripped away from her like one of the beautiful sea stars from a slick wet rock.

Oh God, oh God, oh God.

She drew up her knees and hugged herself and shook, panting for breaths. She could hear herself gasping. She must be in shock, she felt so strange. Cold, and frightened, as if an intruder had crept in and violated her, as if she would never feel safe again.

Nobody must ever know. That was her only hope. Nobody. Ever.

Eventually the shaking passed, and she saw again her kitchen, tidy and spotlessly clean, however shabby, and on the refrigerator Shelly’s bright crayon drawings that were supposed to be sea stars or seals or horses, those inner imaginings that her short fingers were not yet capable of rendering. It was home: loving, safe, clean and ordered. What else mattered? Certainly not money.

Nor blood. She didn’t care whose ran through Shelly’s veins. She would never let it matter.

But first, she had to be sure.

The blue plastic clock on the wall said eight-thirty. Not too late to call Brian’s mother.

Ruth Schoening’s voice held caution, once she knew who was on the phone.

“Lynn. My, it’s late in the evening to be calling.”

Not: Oh, gracious, Shelly is all right, isn’t she?

Lynn noticed the lack, and decided on honesty. “Brian’s told you he doesn’t think Shelly is his daughter, hasn’t he?”

The pause resonated with awkwardness. “He did say something.”

“I would never…” The automatic denial caught in Lynn’s throat. Oh, God. She might someday have to claim she had. She took a breath. “You don’t believe that, do you?”

Really, she was begging, You know me. Please say that you have faith in me, that you love Shelly no matter what.

“It’s not really my business,” her ex-husband’s mother said, the constraint in her voice obvious.

“She’s your granddaughter.”

“Is she?”

She had begun to shake again, Lynn noticed with peculiar detachment. “This is so ridiculous,” she exclaimed, trying to laugh and failing.

“I hope so,” Ruth said. “But, you know, he’s right—Shelly doesn’t look like anybody in the family.”

“When my grandmother was a little girl…”

“Brian said he’d looked through your family album, and Shelly doesn’t look like anybody on your side, either. She’s so…so dark, and with that pointy chin she makes me think of, oh, a pixie from a fairy tale. My children were round and sturdy and blond. Like little Swedes.”

She always said that as if Swedish children were fairer than any other kind. She never addressed the fact that Schoening was a German name, not Scandinavian.

Obviously, there would be no assurances of unfailing love no matter what. Shelly would lose her grandparents, too, if it came to that.

“Well,” Lynn said, “the reason I’m calling is that I’m considering having Shelly tested so we can lay this foolishness to rest. It makes me mad to have to subject her to needles and all that scariness, but I might do it. So what I wondered is, do you remember what Brian’s blood type is?”

“Oh, yes,” his mother said promptly. “He’s O positive, just like me. What a good idea, Lynn! Doubts should always be laid to rest, don’t you think?”

Fury kindled in her breast. Now that she’d gotten what she wanted, she let anger have its rein, sharpening her voice. “What I think is that all this is incredibly insulting. I understand that Brian’s still angry about our divorce, but you know me better than to believe this…this hogwash. You claim to love Shelly. You always say I should bring her for visits more often, that she’s adorable, that I should send pictures so you can show all your friends, and now you talk about her as if she’s tainted and you’ve always known something was wrong with her. She’s…she’s a bright, beautiful child whose eyes don’t happen to be blue. Well, I’m not Swedish, and I don’t expect my daughter to look like she is!” Lynn ended with a snap. “That’s what I think.”

She didn’t wait for a response. She hung up the telephone in a righteous rage that deserted her too quickly. How could she get mad, when Shelly wasn’t Brian’s daughter? Maybe she was the one who was blind! Maybe she should have realized immediately that something was wrong, that the baby the nurses handed her was a changeling.

But she hadn’t, oh, she hadn’t. Instead, the connection had been deep and instant, a mother’s love for this child and only this one.

Well, the fierceness of her love hadn’t diminished. She would tell Brian that she wasn’t going to get Shelly tested, and if he cut his daughter off, so be it. She would let him live with a creeping feeling of shame. It would serve him right.

She stood up, as wearily as if she’d just overcome a violent bout of flu, and turned off the kitchen light, using the glow from the bathroom to find her way to her bedroom.

Life might get harder; Shelly would be hurt that her father didn’t want her. But no one must ever know.

THE DREAM CAME EVERY NIGHT from then on. She was searching desperately for someone. For her little girl. First she was on the beach, and she’d been reading her mail, and the fog had rolled in, and she looked up suddenly and realized she couldn’t see her.

“Shelly!” she began crying. “Shelly, where are you?” She leaped to her feet and spun in every direction, crying over and over, “Shelly!”

She began stumbling toward the water. Boulders reared from nowhere, tripping her. The roar of the surf filled her ears, and she knew with sickening certainty that Shelly had been caught by a wave.

But, no, she wasn’t on the beach at all. She was in a city, although the fog still played tricks with her eyes. The sound was from traffic. Oh, no! How could she have looked away, even for a moment? The sea was merciless, but cars were deadly.

She searched the sidewalks frantically for a bright chestnut head. People passing ignored her. Then she saw her, out on the median, cars racing by without slowing at all for the toddler who teetered there. She wore rags; she looked like Cosette in Les Misérables, wretched and unwanted. Brimming with tears, her bright blue eyes met Lynn’s momentarily through a break in the traffic, but without recognition.

My daughter doesn’t know me, Lynn realized with horror.

“Stay where you are!” Lynn screamed. “Wait! I’m coming!”

But her voice meant nothing to this child, and with greater shock Lynn discovered she didn’t know her own daughter’s name.

Sobbing, the little girl stepped from the curb.

And Lynn awakened, as she did every night, her screamed “No!” trembling on her lips and tears running down her cheeks.

With a moan she curled into a ball and shuddered. At last she went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face, then stared hopelessly at herself in the mirror.

Of course she was having dreams; their content was hardly subtle.

Somewhere out there was another little girl, one she’d carried in her womb. How many promises she’d made to that baby as she dreamed of the future! She sang to her and laughed and tickled her own belly when a tiny toe or elbow surfaced. She played music and danced and read aloud, just so her child would know her voice, would know she was loved.

But, through no fault of her own, she hadn’t kept those promises. Her baby had never heard her voice again. Someone else had taken her home. Did these other parents love her and sing to her and tickle her toes? Or had she gone home with a teenager who hadn’t really wanted to get pregnant? Perhaps she was in a foster home, or had an angry father who shook her when she wouldn’t quit crying. What if she was slow to develop, but nobody was patient? Or what if they loved her, these parents, but they were raising her the only way they knew how, by spanking her when she got cranky or broke something, by screaming at her with the anger of their own childhoods in their voices?

“If only…” Lynn breathed soundlessly. If only she could know. See that this other little girl was loved and cared for, read to and hugged, that her artwork was on the refrigerator for all to admire.

If she knew, the dreams would go away.

But how could she ever find out, without contacting the hospital and telling them? Without taking the chance of losing Shelly?

That was the torment. Risk the little girl who was the center of her life, who meant everything to her, for the sake of one who couldn’t possibly remember her voice. Who would have forgotten her songs and the stories she’d promised to finish someday, when they could giggle together.

She crept down the hall like a ghost to her daughter’s room, hovering in the doorway because the bed nearly filled the space, which in a house of this era had probably been meant as a sewing room or a nursery. Sunny yellow and black cats frolicked among sunflowers on the wallpaper that climbed the slanted ceiling. Yellow curtains covered the tall sash window. Under a pale lemon-yellow and white comforter, Shelly slept peacefully. Lynn could just make out her face in the glow from the hall, and thought, Ruth is right. She looks like a Celt from old stories, a fairy child, with that small, pointy chin, that high curving forehead and glossy brown hair as straight as promises that were kept.

Risk her, for the dream child?

Lynn closed her eyes on a soft, agonized exhalation. How could she?

How could she not?

CHAPTER TWO

LATE AGAIN.

Adam Landry swore at the driver of the car in front of him, which hesitated just too long and missed the one and only opening to make a left turn before the light became red.

Damn, he thought bitterly. They’d both be sitting through another full light. And he was already—he snatched an edgy look at the clock on his dash—ten minutes past the closing of his daughter’s preschool.

This was getting to be routine, and if he wasn’t careful they’d ask him to make other arrangements for Rose. But the Cottage Path Preschool and Day Care was the best.

Oh, hell, why lie to himself? He didn’t know if it was best. He didn’t know a thing about it, except that Jennifer had chosen it, an eternity ago when she was pregnant and joyful, not planning to go back to work but figuring she’d need a place for drop-in sometimes.

Over dinner, she’d told him about it, her eyes sparkling with pleasure. “It’s the Cottage Path Preschool. Isn’t that perfect? Can you believe it? Our Rose will trip up the path to the cottage. Oh!” She shivered in delight, and he’d momentarily seen the vision that had become the center of her life: a little girl with the same mahogany brown hair as her mommy, her legs skinny, dimples flashing and her giggle a trill like a flute solo that reached for heaven and found it.

Their child.

And him? What had he said? A gruff, “You’re not letting the name of the place suck you in, are you?”

She’d only laughed at him, her joy undimmed. “Don’t be silly. It’s a wonderful preschool! The director’s written a book about early childhood development. They have animals—chickens and goats and this big lazy dog that lets kids climb all over him and only grunts. And puzzles and books and blocks and puppets! It’s wonderland.”

Pain stabbed now and Adam rubbed his chest. He’d never considered any place else for Rose. He was trying to raise their daughter as Jennifer would have wanted to, which meant he scraped his memory for nuggets his wife might have dropped, perhaps in bed when he scanned the financial news a last time while she chattered on in her light voice as if oblivious to his lack of attention.

Adam took another savage look at the clock and swore. Was he screwing up one more thing Jennifer had wanted for Rose?

But maybe it wasn’t the best choice now. Maybe he should go for a nanny.

He tensed when the light turned green and willed the driver of the Buick to make a dash before cross-traffic began. But, hell, no. The car didn’t even inch forward. The heel of Adam’s hand was on the horn when he clenched his teeth and made himself wrap his fingers around the wheel again. Shit. If he hadn’t stayed for that last goddamn phone call, he wouldn’t be in such a hurry he wanted other drivers to take their lives in their hands just to get out of his way. Why hadn’t he walked out, ignored the ringing?

He couldn’t do everything.

He had to try. He owed it to Rose. And to Jennifer.

An interminable five more minutes had passed before he barreled into the parking lot, yanked on the emergency brake and killed the engine, slamming his door before he strode in.

The director of the preschool, a woman of his own age named Melissa Gearhart, waited in the entry, eyes cool.

“Mr. Landry. Rose has been worried.”

His intense anxiety made itself felt in a long huff of breath. “God, I’m sorry. I’ve done it again.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to start charging you when staff has to stay late, like today.”

“I understand.” He swallowed. “Where’s Rose?”

The dark-haired woman with tired smudges beneath her eyes turned. “Under the climber.”

He stepped past her into the main activity room, where the floor was covered with bright mats to pad falls from the slide and wooden peg climber. He had to circle a playhouse before he saw his daughter, lying on the mat with her thumb in her mouth.

Wearing clothes he’d never seen before. Ill fitting and mismatched.

“She had an accident again,” Melissa said softly behind him. “No big deal. I’ve got her clothes in a plastic bag for you. Just bring those back when you’ve washed them.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, acknowledging more failure. Or maybe not—he hadn’t had the guts to ask the mothers who picked up their three-year-olds whether they had potty accidents still, too. Or the occasional father, none exclusive parents the way he was. Adam didn’t even like to ask Melissa, because he didn’t want to know something was wrong, that he’d already warped his beloved child.

If only he knew what the hell he was doing.

If only Jennifer were alive to help him do it.

“Hey, Rose Red,” he said softly, crouching. “Ready to bloom?”

“Daddy!” She erupted to her feet and into his arms, her sky-blue eyes flooding with tears. “You’re late, and I’m hungry, and I had a accident, an’…”

He stemmed the flow. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Here you were, all by yourself.”

“Except for Lissa,” Rose mumbled against his shoulder. She snuffled. “Lissa didn’t leave me.”

He felt the crushing addition, Like you do. Every day.

She’d taken lately to holding on to him and screaming when he tried to drop her off in the morning. He felt like the worst parent in the whole damned world when the day-care workers had to pry his daughter’s fingers off him and haul her away, when the last thing he saw was Rose’s round tear-streaked face. Those desperate, pleading eyes haunted his days, gave him a feeling of self-loathing.

But, goddamn it, he had to work!

Rationally he knew that other kids cried in the morning, too, that it was probably just a stage. Reason didn’t quell the guilt that ate at his gut like too many cups of coffee.

She needed her daddy, and he wasn’t there.

He hustled her out to the car, belatedly grabbing the white plastic garbage sack that held Rose’s own clothes. That meant laundry tonight. He didn’t want to leave these for Ann, their twenty-something housekeeper-cook. When Rose wet the bed, he always changed it, too. Three and a half wasn’t so old, he tried to tell himself, but he hadn’t seen those discreet plastic bags go home with Rose’s friends Rainy and Sylvie, either. Not in months.

His daughter fell asleep during the drive home, worn out by a ten-hour day, and more guilt stabbed him. Poor Rosebud. How did a little girl grow into a woman without a mother to lead the way? What did he know about girlish secrets or adolescent crushes or makeup or menstrual cramps?

Well, he’d damn well learn. He was mommy and daddy both, determined not to foist his daughter’s upbringing on a series of nannies. Jennifer wouldn’t have wanted that.

I didn’t mean it, he said silently, speaking to her as if she were listening. No nanny.

A nanny would be a replacement. A substitute mother. No one could be Jennifer, petite, quick moving, eternally optimistic, alive.

Dead, in every meaningful way, long before her daughter was cut from her belly.

He hadn’t even looked at Rose when doctors performed the C-section. He’d been holding Jennifer’s hand, although Jennifer didn’t know it, would never know it, because she was brain-dead. He’d been saying goodbye, because the shell of her body had no purpose anymore, now that it wasn’t needed to sustain her child. He had agreed that she would be unhooked from machines as soon as the baby could survive on her own.

“I’ll do my best,” he had whispered to the love of his life. One last promise, he thought, praying she didn’t know how he had dreaded the birth because it meant severing any last wisp of hope that the doctors were wrong, that she would yet wake up.

How could she be gone? He had gripped her hand so hard it should have hurt, but she only lay there, eyes closed, breast rising and falling with the hissing push of the respirator, unaware of her daughter’s birth, of his tears and whispered, wrenching, “Goodbye, Jenny.” Unaware when he blundered from the room.

Unaware when her heart stopped, when the last breath caught in her throat.

His bright-faced, pretty, otherworldly wife was already dead when her daughter began life.

He named her Jenny Rose, and called her Rose, this little girl who showed no signs of looking like her mama, to his relief and disappointment both. Her hair had developed red tints and curls, and the deep blue of her eyes never changed, as everyone said it would.

Some days, Adam was intensely grateful that he didn’t have to think about his lost Jenny every time he looked at his daughter. And yet, he’d wanted to hold on to a part of her, remember her, never lose sight of her pixie face, but sometimes now he had to pick up the photo that sat on his bedside table in a silver frame to remember her. Sometimes she faded to the point that he thought perhaps her face was round, like Rose’s, or her nose solemnly straight; perhaps her hair had a forgotten wave, or she had moved or talked with a deliberateness that spoke of long thought.

But the sight of her face, even in the photograph, reminded him of her high cheekbones and pointy chin, turned-up nose and full yet delicate lips, always parted as she breathlessly waited for the chance to launch into speech. How often she’d had to crinkle her nose in apology, because she had been untactful or indiscreet, words flowing without thought. Even when she was hurtful, he’d found her spontaneity endearing, innocence to be treasured and guarded.

Adam had wanted the same for Rose, that she should grow up free to chatter. He wanted her to believe, always, that what she thought and felt was valued.

Instead his Rose was a quiet child, as thoughtful as her mother had been airy. Their daughter was in personality more his than Jennifer’s, although she didn’t look much like him, either.

He paused at the curb long enough to grab the mail from the box, then drove straight into the garage. Rose didn’t stir when he turned off the engine. When he went around to unbuckle her car seat, he set the mail on the car roof. A card for her from Jennifer’s parents, he noted with one corner of his attention. Good, Rose loved to get mail. A credit card statement, probably a demand for money from the utility company, the usual junk hoping he’d buy a new bedroom suite or refinance his house, and something from the hospital where Rose had been born.

The bills for Jennifer’s protracted death and Rose’s birth had been horrendous. But paid, every last one of them. The insurance company, bless them, hadn’t balked at a one.

The doctors and nursing staff had been compassionate, patient, gentle and kind. And he never wanted to see any of them again. Never wanted to walk those halls, smell cleansers and death. He’d go to any other hospital in the city in preference.

Unless perhaps, he thought, easing his sleepy, grumbling daughter from her car seat, Rose was seriously ill or hurt. Then he could endure the memories, for her.

In the house, Adam plopped her on the couch and put on a video. Winnie the Pooh, her current favorite. Hurrying to the kitchen, he took a casserole covered in plastic wrap from the refrigerator and put it straight into the microwave. High, twenty minutes, Ann had written on the sticky note attached to it. She was a gem. The kitchen sparkled, as always, and her cooking was damned good.

The one thing she didn’t do was child care. She’d made that plain from the start. Her disinclination suited his reluctance to pass any part of his job as parent onto someone else, even though it would have been handy to have a housekeeper who would watch Rose when she was sick and couldn’t go to day care, or to pick her up when Adam had to stay late in the office. But he’d known how easy it would be to slide from that into having Ann pick her up every day, feed her dinner, then perhaps make her breakfast and drive her to the Cottage Path Preschool, until in the end he wasn’t doing much but kissing his daughter good-night.

So he and Ann had a deal: in return for weekly checks, she was like the shoemaker’s elves, invisible and indispensable. Rose had scarcely even met her, and Adam and she communicated by sticky notes left on the fridge, but the house was clean and she always had dinner ready to go in the oven or microwave. Saturdays he cooked himself. Sundays, he and Rose usually went out for dinner, her choice, which meant McDonald’s or Renny’s Pizza Parlor, but he didn’t mind.

While the microwave hummed, he thumbed through the mail and discarded three-quarters of it, setting aside the card for Rose when she was a little more alert. The envelope from the hospital Adam fingered. He was strangely reluctant to open it. Some kind of follow-up, he supposed, or maybe they wanted him on their board of governors, or…

Well, hell, find out.

He read the letter through the first time without understanding it. A distressing discovery had been made. At this point, hospital officials didn’t know where to assign blame. He could be assured an investigation was under way. In the meantime, Jenny Rose Landry should undergo testing.

Testing for what?

He knew and wouldn’t let himself see the sentence that began, “Because of unusual circumstances, the mother of a girl born on the same day as your daughter in this hospital has found that she has been raising a child who is not a biological relation to her.” The letter continued by raising the possibility that two of the six baby girls born that day had been switched in the nursery. Administrators were asking that parents agree to blood tests to determine whether this was, indeed, what had happened. He was particularly urged, because his child had been born within twenty minutes of the girl in question.

When Adam did, finally, make himself see, and when he grasped all that this could mean, anger roared through his veins, darkening his vision.

Could they really be so incompetent as to make a mistake of this magnitude? Babies were supposed to be tagged immediately so this wasn’t possible! Hadn’t they put a wristband on Jenny Rose while she was still bloody, still giving her first thin cry?

He hadn’t seen. Adam bent his head suddenly and gripped the edge of the kitchen counter as panic whipped around the perimeter of his anger, as if it were only the eye of a hurricane.

They might not have followed the usual procedures, because the circumstances were so unusual. Respecting his grief, nurses might have carried the infant girl straight to the nursery before taking the Apgar and banding her wrist.

Even then—his anger revived—how could they screw up so royally? What did they do, leave babies lying around like Lego blocks in a preschool? Had the nurses wandered by sometime later and said, “Oh, yeah, this one must be the Landry kid?”

But the panic was more powerful than the anger, because his basic nature wouldn’t let him be less than logical. If a mistake had been made that night, his daughter had all too likely been part of it. No mother or father had been hovering over her; she had never been placed at her mother’s breast, and she wasn’t held by her father until hours after her birth. Adam inhaled sharply, swearing. Hours? God. He hadn’t thought about Jenny Rose until the next day, when his grief had dulled and he’d remembered that his wife had left a trust to him.

Only, by that time, the baby that had been lifted, blood-slick, from Jennifer’s belly might have accidentally been switched with another little girl born the same hour.

Where had her parents been? he raged. How could they not have paid more attention? Why hadn’t they noticed the switch?

He breathed heavily through his mouth. The microwave was beeping.

“Daddy?” Jenny Rose was saying from the kitchen doorway, the single word murmured around her thumb.

Think, he commanded himself. Then, Don’t think. Not now.

“Yeah, Petunia?” He sounded almost normal.

She gave a hiccuping giggle. “Rose, Daddy! Not Petunia.”

It was an old joke. “Oh, yeah,” he agreed. “I knew you were some flower or other.”

“Daddy, I’m hungry.”

“Lucky for you, dinner’s done.” He hadn’t put on a vegetable, but right now he didn’t care.

He dished up the casserole in bowls and carried them out to the family room where he joined Rose in watching Tigger and Pooh Bear try to patch up Eeyore’s problems, in their bumbling, well-meaning way.

Like the damned hospital officials.

Why contact me? Adam wondered. Was that mother dissatisfied with the child she’d been given? Did she want to trade her in for another one? Fresh anger buffeted him. Wasn’t his biological child good enough for her?

Not just his. Jennifer’s.

That’s when it hit him: In this other home, there might be a little girl who did have Jenny’s pointed chin and quirky smile and ability to flit from idea to idea as if the last was forgotten as soon as the temptation of the next presented itself.

He groaned, barely muffling the sound in time to prevent Rose from wanting to know if Daddy hurt. Could she kiss it and make it better?

His Rose. By God, nobody was taking her from him.

But. Jennifer had left their baby in trust to him, and he might have lost her. He hadn’t even looked at her. If only he’d seen her tiny features, he would have known, later, when they handed him Rose.

He made his decision then, as simply as that, although not without fear greater than any he’d felt since the phone call telling him his wife had been in a car accident.

Nobody would take his Jenny Rose from him. But he had to let her be tested, and if she wasn’t his daughter, wasn’t Jennifer’s…

Well, he had to see the child who was. Find out what he could do to make her life right, from now on. Earn the trust he’d been given.

ADAM DIDN’T TAKE his Rosebud to that hospital. He didn’t trust them, although he never defined the sins he thought them willing to commit. He only knew he had to protect Rose. So he took her to her own pediatrician for DNA testing. And then Adam went to the hospital with the results in his hand.

The results that had told him Jenny Rose was neither his daughter nor Jennifer’s.

There, he listened to repeated expressions of regret, saw in their eyes the intense anxiety that meant officials had lawsuits dancing in their heads at night like poisonous sugarplums. He didn’t quiet their fears. Hadn’t made up his mind about a lawsuit. They deserved to pay until they hurt. But he didn’t want or need blood money. And no justice he could exact on them would make up for what they had done to him and Rose. To his other daughter. And perhaps, to Rose’s biological parents, although it wasn’t yet clear to him whether they shared his agony, or were hoping to steal Jenny Rose.

They talked of an investigation. They were interviewing nurses, although it was taking time, they said, sweating. Several on duty that night no longer worked there, or even lived in Portland. But babies were always banded in the birthing room, that was hospital policy. Somebody would surely remember why, on this occasion, policy hadn’t been followed.

Adam knew why it hadn’t, in the case of his daughter. Although it should have been. How could the nurses and doctors not have realized how doubly precious his daughter would be to him, once the lines on the monitors flattened, once the machines were unplugged and the illusion of life was taken from his wife? Seeing his grief, how could they have been so careless?

And how the hell could two mistakes so monumental have been made on the same night?

The other mother—the hospital’s representatives cleared their throats—Jenny Rose’s biological mother, that is, had been hemorrhaging. Doctors had feared for her life. Had been concentrating on saving her. Thus, in this case, too, the baby had been an afterthought. Nurses had hustled her away, so she didn’t distract the doctors. Neither parent had looked at her; the father had been intent on his wife, and she had been semiconscious. The mistake was inexcusable, but—ahem—they could understand how it had been made. Or, at least, how it had been set up, they said. Two bassinets next to each other in the nursery, two baby girls born within twenty minutes of each other, both brown haired. And newborns could look so much alike.

He vented his rage at this point and they quailed. But what good did his rage do? What satisfaction could he take in frightening a bunch of lawyers and administrators who hadn’t been there that night, probably hardly knew what wing of the hospital housed the delivery rooms or the nursery?

None.

“The future,” they suggested tentatively, and he bit back further rage even he recognized as naked fear. Nobody had said, She’s not your daughter. It won’t do you any good to go to court and fight for custody. The biological parents will win, given that this situation is not their fault any more than it’s yours. But they were thinking it.

“All right,” he said abruptly, voice harsh. “I’ll meet with these other parents.”

It would be only the mother, he was told. She was divorced, and the biological father was not at this point interested in custody. She was anxious to talk to him, they said. Could he please bring a photograph of Jenny Rose?

The hospital set it up for the next afternoon. Each parent could bring an attorney. Adam chose not to, although he knew it might be foolish. Right now, he just wanted to see what he was facing. He expected the worst.

The woman had begun this horror in a quest to find her natural daughter, apparently never minding the cost to the innocent child she had raised.

Adam fully expected to detest her.

A nearly sleepless night followed a half-a-dozen others. He’d forgotten how to sleep, except in nightmarish bursts from which he awakened to the sound of Rosebud screaming. But when he rolled from bed and stumbled into the hall, he invariably realized the sobs, the terror, were in his head. She slept peacefully, he would see, standing in the doorway to her room, able to make out her round, gentle face in the soft glow from her Pooh Bear night-light. He hadn’t told her about any of this. She didn’t know that a woman she’d never met wanted to tear her away from her home and her daddy. He might not be the best parent in the world, he thought in anguish, but she trusted him. He’d given her that much.

He left her that morning at the Cottage Path Preschool and let her cling longer than usual before he handed her, crying, to a day-care worker. Navigating Portland’s old freeways like an automaton, Adam arrived at the hospital early. His eyes burned from lack of sleep, but he otherwise felt numb. He wanted to see her before she saw him, before she knew who he was. As he locked his Lexus and walked toward the entrance, he searched the parking lot for any woman who could possibly be the mother of a child the age of his daughter. Daughters. Of Jenny Rose and… Shelly. Shelly Schoening.

But of course he was denied any kind of anonymous entry. A receptionist was poised in wait to usher him onto an elevator with murmurs and more regrets and an “Oh, dear” when she got a good look at his face just before the elevator doors shut.

A lawyer took over when the doors sprang open on the third floor. “The conference room is just down this way.”

They were so damned helpful, Adam was reminded of an old football trick: help your opponent up as fast as you knocked him down. Never let him rest.

The carpet up here was plush, the plants glossy, the artwork hanging on the papered walls elegant. This part of the hospital was completely divorced from the trenches, where babies were born and surgeries performed, where death happened. Up here they knew bills and statistics. He could have been in a law firm.

The conference room was smallish, holding one long table and eight chairs upholstered in an unobtrusive oatmeal. The air had that hushed quality that told him the room was well soundproofed. A place where grieving parents and spouses could be persuaded to sign away their loved ones’ body parts. He might have been here, back then. He didn’t remember.

Not even this air could muffle the anxiety crackling from his escort. It warned him before he saw her, sitting alone at the table, facing the door.

This slender woman with curly auburn hair had also wanted to be here early; wanted to see him before he saw her. She, too, clutched at any minor advantage.

This round, she’d won.

Poleaxed, he was barely aware of walking to the other side of the table and pulling out a chair. Sitting down, gripping the wooden arms, and looking a hungry, shocked fill.

She was Jenny Rose’s mother. He would have recognized her in a crowd. A round, pleasant face, pretty rather than beautiful, a scattering of tiny freckles on a small nose, a curve of forehead and a way of tilting her head to one side…all were Rose. And that hair. God, that hair. Shiny, untamable waves, brown lit by a brushfire. He’d shampooed that hair, eased a brush through it, struggled to braid it. Kissed it.

“What,” he asked hoarsely, “do you want?”

CHAPTER THREE

HE STRODE IN, just as she’d feared, a big angry man with a hard face. From the moment he sat down, she felt his hostility like porcupine quills jabbing and hooking her skin.

“What do you want?” he asked brusquely.

No preambles. No introductions. No “we’re in a tough spot, aren’t we?”

Through her exhaustion and dread, Lynn said, “I want this never to have happened.”

His eyes narrowed a flicker.

Lynn had completely forgotten they weren’t alone in the room until one of the lawyers cleared his throat. “Ms. Chanak, let me introduce Adam Landry. Mr. Landry, Lynn Chanak.”

His mouth thinned, but he gave a brief, reluctant nod in acknowledgment of the formal introduction.

She swallowed. “Mr. Landry.”

He looked past her. “I’d prefer to talk to Ms. Chanak alone. If—” the coldly commanding gaze touched her “—she doesn’t mind.”

In the flurry of objection, she caught only one phrase, which annoyed her unreasonably.

“The hospital’s interest is in seeing us come up with an amicable future plan.” She’d memorized that phrase: amicable future plan. Was there such a thing? “Only we can decide on the future of our daughters. We need to get to know each other. Please.”

She had hoped, heaven help her, for approval. He only waited.

The lawyers offered their intervention if it was needed. Adam Landry said nothing. Lynn stared at her hands. After a moment, the two men backed out, shutting the door behind them. The silence in their wake was as absolute as any she’d ever heard. The courage that had gotten her this far deserted her. She couldn’t look up.

Her nerves had reached the screaming point when Adam Landry said at last, “Perhaps I phrased my question incorrectly. Why did you start this? Did you suspect your daughter…” he stumbled, “Shelly, wasn’t yours?”

“No.” At last she lifted her head, letting him see her tumult. “No. Never. It was my ex-husband. He…he didn’t want to pay the child support anymore. He claimed I must have had an affair. That she wasn’t his child. But it wasn’t true! I never…” She bit her lip and said more quietly, “I wouldn’t do something like that. So I took Shelly to have a blood test to prove to Brian that she was his. Only…”

“She wasn’t.”

“No. Which meant—” she took a deep breath “—that she wasn’t mine, either. Unless you believe…”

“In immaculate conception?” His voice was dry.

“Yes. And…and I don’t.” She tried for a smile and failed. “I wasn’t going to tell anybody. Only, then I started worrying about the other little girl. The one who was really my daughter.”

The dreams wouldn’t impress him, not this man. He reminded her too much of the lawyers. His gray suit cost more than she spent on food and mortgage in a month or more. His dark hair was clipped short, but by a stylist, not a barber. She could easily picture his big, capable hands gripping the leather-covered wheel of an expensive sedan, or resting on the keyboard of a laptop computer. Not changing diapers, or sifting through the sand for a seashell, or brushing away tears.

Who was raising Jenny Rose Landry? A grandmother? A nanny? Anxiety crimped her chest.

Softly she finished, “I wanted to be sure she was all right. Loved.”

“And that’s it. That’s all you want.” His tone said he didn’t believe her for a second.

Lynn didn’t blame him for his skepticism. Already, if she was being honest, she’d have to admit that she wouldn’t be satisfied with that modest goal.

“I don’t know.” She held his gaze, although she quaked inside. “I’m not sure anymore. I suppose I’d like to meet her. And…perhaps get acquainted. Now that I know she doesn’t have a mother.”

“What makes you so sure she needs one?” Landry stood abruptly and shoved his chair back. Looming over her, hands planted on the table, he said tautly, “Is it so impossible to believe I’m an adequate parent?”

Her breath caught. She’d obviously struck a raw nerve. “No. Of course not. I’m a single parent myself, and I think I’m doing a fine job.” Naturally she would say that; did she really expect him to believe her? More uncertainly, she continued, “It’s just that…” For all her rehearsing, she didn’t know how to express these inchoate emotions, these wants, these needs, these fears. “She’s my daughter,” Lynn finished simply.

A muscle jerked in his cheek. “You suddenly want to be a mother to my daughter.”

“Aren’t you curious, too?” How timid she sounded! No, perhaps hopeful was the word. Could it be that he didn’t want Shelly, wouldn’t try to reclaim his birth daughter? That she’d never had to worry at all?

He swung away in a jerky motion and took two steps to the window. Gazing out at—what? the parking lot?—he killed her hopes in a flat, unrevealing voice. “Yes. I’m curious. Why do you think I’m here?”

Lynn whispered, “Is that all? You’re just…curious?”

He faced her, anger blazing in his eyes. “My wife died and never held her baby. Now I find out that neither have I. Does ‘curious’ cover my reaction? Probably not. But we have to start somewhere.”

He sounded reasonable and yet scared her to death. She’d hoped for a completely different kind of man. Perhaps a car mechanic, struggling to make ends meet, grease under his fingernails and kindness in his eyes. Or a small-business owner. Someone like her. Ordinary. Not a formidable, wealthy man used to having his way and able to pay to get it. Someone she could never beat, if it came to a fight.

Make sure it doesn’t, she told herself, trying to quiet the renewed panic. You can work something out. Go slowly. He may not be that interested in parenting even one girl, much less two.

“I brought pictures,” she said tentatively. “Of Shelly.”

He closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed the back of his neck. Lynn could tell he was trying, too, when he said gruffly, “I brought some of Rose, too.”

They stared at each other, neither moving. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, she thought, semihysterically. How absurd. Make the first move.

Lynn bent down and took the envelope from her purse, which sat on the floor by her feet. Slowly she opened it, her fingers stiff and reluctant. She felt as if she were sharing something incredibly private, pulling back a curtain on the small, sunny space that was her life.

He came back to the table and sat down. As she removed the pile of photos from the envelope, he pulled a matching one from the pocket of his suit jacket. When she pushed the photographs across the span of oak, he did the same with his.

Lynn reached for them, hesitated.

“She looks like you,” he said, startling her.

“What?”

“Her hair.” His gaze felt like a touch. “Her nose, and her freckles, and her chin. But her eyes are blue.”

“Brian’s…Brian’s are blue.”

Her hands were even more awkward now. Did she want to see the child’s face? There might be no going back.

She turned the small pile of four-by-five photographs, peripherally aware that he was doing the same. And then the fist drove into her belly, bringing a small gasp from her, and Adam Landry vanished from her awareness.

She saw only the little girl, grinning at the camera. At her. My daughter, Lynn thought in astonishment.

He was right: Jenny Rose could have been Lynn at that age, except for the pure crystal blue of her eyes. The little girl’s face was round, solemn in the other pictures Lynn thumbed through. She was still plump, not skinny and ever in motion like Shelly. The freckles—Lynn touched them, almost startled by the slick feel of photographic paper instead of the crinkling, warm nose she saw. How like hers! Rose’s mouth was sweet, pursed as if she wanted to consider deeply before she rendered a judgment.

There she was in another photo, on Santa’s lap, not crying, but not entirely happy, either. And younger yet, a swimsuit over her diaper, the photograph taken as she stood knee-deep in a small backyard pool filled by a hose. Why wasn’t she smiling more often? Was she truly happy?

Lynn looked through the pictures over and over again, beginning to resent the meager number, hungering for more. What was she really like, this little girl who had once been part of her? What made her sad? What did she think was funny? Did she suck her thumb? Have nightmares? Wish she had a mommy?

At last, at last, she looked up, aware that tears were raining down her cheeks, that Adam Landry had made a sound. Like a blind man, he was touching one of the photographs she’d given him. His fingers shook as he traced, so delicately, her daughter’s face.

She saw him swallow, saw the emotions akin to hers ravage his features.

“Jenny,” he whispered.

“Does she look like your wife?”

His hand curled into a fist. “It’s…uncanny.”

For the first time, Lynn understood. “This must be almost worse for you, with your wife dead.”

He looked up, but his eyes didn’t focus; he might have been blind, or seeing something else. “Our daughter was all I had left.”

She couldn’t draw a breath, only sat paralyzed. He saw the wife he’d loved and lost in Shelly’s face. He would want her. She could even sympathize with how he must feel. She had to meet Jenny Rose, answer the questions the photographs didn’t, hold her, hug her, hear her voice, her laugh, feel her warm breath. She had to be part of her life.

As he would, somehow, have to be part of Shelly’s life.

“I want to see her,” he said, a demand not a request. “Where do you live?”

Her sympathy evaporated at his assumption that he could bulldoze her. She wanted suddenly to lie, or refuse to answer, or…but what was the point? People were easy to find, particularly one who hadn’t been trying to hide. A few phone calls and he could be knocking on her door.

“Otter Beach. Over on the coast. I own a bookstore.”

“Did you bring her with you?”

“No. She’s…she’s home. With a baby-sitter.” Lynn lifted her chin. “What about Jenny Rose? Where’s she?”

As impassive as his face was, still Lynn saw his initial reluctance give way to the same begrudging acceptance. “She goes to a preschool Monday through Friday. While I’m working.”

“You don’t have a nanny, or someone like that?”

“No.” He caught on, and a flush traveled across his cheekbones. “Is that what I look like? A man who takes care of his personal life by writing a check?”

Yes. Oh, yes, that’s exactly what he looked like.

But she couldn’t say so, of course. “What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a stockbroker.”

“It’s just that it’s hard to be a single parent. Most of us do everything because we have to. You don’t.”

“You assume I’m wealthy.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Aren’t you?”

“I make a decent living.”

Ten or twenty times the one she made, if Lynn was any judge.

“Couldn’t you afford a nanny?”

“I don’t want someone else raising my child.” He said it in a hard voice.

The words sliced like a switchblade between the ribs. She was someone else.

He swore. “I wasn’t talking about you.”

“No?”

“When you contacted the hospital, what did you have in mind? That we trade kids?”

Trade kids? Lynn stared at him in shock. Was that what he had in mind?

“You don’t love your—” she corrected herself “—my daughter at all, do you?”

Neither his voice nor his expression softened an iota. “I wasn’t talking about me. You’re the one who started this. I’m asking what you thought you’d get out of it.”

She squeezed her fingers on her lap. “What I’d get out of it? You think I’m using this mix-up to gain something?”

“Why not?” He sounded grim. “You know the hospital is prepared to pay a fortune to shut us up.”

“I don’t want money.” Shaking, she gathered the pictures of the daughter she’d never met and pushed them heedlessly into her purse, then snatched it up and stood. “I told you what I wanted. That’s all I have to say. My attorney will be contacting you about visitation rights.”

“Stop,” he snapped. “Sit down.”

“Why?”

“We have to talk.” He shut his eyes again for a moment, then opened them and let out a ragged breath. “Please.”

Lynn bit her lip, then slowly sat again. “What is there to say?”

“I don’t know, but these are our kids. Do we want the courts mandating their futures?”

“No.” Lynn sagged. “I didn’t bring a lawyer today. I hoped…”

“I hoped, too.” After a long silence he sighed. “Where do you suggest we go from here?”

“I’d like to meet her. Jenny Rose. And I expect you’d like to meet Shelly.” When he nodded, Lynn said fiercely, “You can’t have her, you know. She’s my daughter. I love her. I’m her world.”

Adam Landry’s hard mouth twisted. “It would seem we have something in common. I’d fight to the death for Rose. Nobody is taking her. So you can put that right out of your mind.”

Had she imagined raising both girls? “Then what?” she asked in a low voice.

He shook his head. “Visitation. We can take it slow.”

“Have you told Rose about me?” Lynn asked curiously. “About what happened?”

“No. You?”

“No.” She made a face. “It’s a hard thing to explain to a three-year-old.”

“On Rose’s nightstand is a picture of her mommy, who she knows is in heaven. How the hell do I introduce you?” Bafflement and anger filled his dark eyes, so like Shelly’s.

“All we can do is our best.” How prissy she sounded, Lynn thought in distaste.

He didn’t react to her sugar pill, continuing as if she’d said nothing, “It’s going to scare the hell out of her if I suddenly announce she isn’t my daughter at all. And, oh yeah, here’s your real mommy.”

Lynn had imagined the same conversation a million times. To a child this age, parents were the only security. They were the anchor that made exploring the world possible.

“Maybe we should meet first,” she suggested. “Would it be less scary once they know us?”

“Maybe.” He made a rough sound in his throat. “Yeah. All right. We’ll all just be buddies at first.”

She let his irony pass, giving a small nod. When he said nothing more, Lynn clutched her purse in her lap. “Shall I bring Shelly to Portland one day?”

“Why don’t I come there instead? Rosebud would enjoy a day at the beach. It might seem more natural.”

Rosebud. She liked that. She liked, too, what the gentle nickname suggested about this man. Perhaps he wasn’t as tough as he seemed.

“Fine. Saturday?”

They agreed. He wrote down her address and phone number, then gave her a business card with his. It all felt so…mundane, a mere appointment, not the clock set ticking for an earthshaking event.

He escorted her out of the conference room and, with his hand on her elbow, hustled her past the cluster of lawyers and administrators lying in wait.

Over his shoulder, he told them brusquely, “We’ll be in touch once we figure this out.”

Lynn imagined the consternation brewing at their abrupt departure. Together.

She and Adam Landry rode down silently in the elevator, Lynn painfully conscious of his physical presence. She caught him glancing at her once or twice, but each time he looked quickly away, frowning at the lighted numbers over the door. Of course, he couldn’t help being so imposing at his height, with broad shoulders and the build of a natural athlete. Nor could he help that face, with Slavic cheekbones and bullish jaw and high forehead that together made him handsome enough to displace Mel Gibson in a woman’s fantasies.

She was glad that Shelly looked like her mother and not her father. It would have been too bizarre for words to see her daughter in this stranger’s face. As though they must have had sex and she just didn’t remember it, or else how could she have breast-fed his child, raised her, loved her?

Heat suddenly blossomed on her cheeks. Had he had the same thought, she wondered, about her? As though he must know her on a level deeper than he understood? No wonder he didn’t want to look at her!

When the elevator doors opened, he gripped her arm again as if she wouldn’t know where to go without his guidance. Habit, she gathered, when he was with a woman. “Where are you parked?”

“My car is right out in front.”

He urged her forward, his stride so long she had to scuttle along like a tiny hermit crab just to avoid falling and being hauled ungracefully to her feet. Outside the hospital doors, Lynn balked.

Adam Landry looked so surprised when she pointedly removed her elbow from his bruising grip that she might have been amused under other circumstances.

“My car is right over there.” She gestured. “I don’t see a purse snatcher lurking. I can make it on my own, thank you, Mr. Landry.”

“Adam.”

“Adam,” she acknowledged. “I’ll see you Saturday.”

The lines between his nose and mouth deepened. “We’ll be there.”

Neither moved for an awkward moment. Then he bent his head in a stiff goodbye and stalked away across the parking lot. With a sense of unreality she watched him go, wondering how she would have viewed him if they’d passed in the halls earlier, before she knew who he was.

I would have thought he must be a doctor, she decided. He had that air of money and command, as though he could make life and death decisions before breakfast and assume it was his right.

He would be a tough opponent, way out of her league.

Then she didn’t dare let him become an opponent, Lynn thought again. Although she disliked the idea acutely, she must accommodate him, coax him, play friends—do whatever it took to stay out of court.

Her stomach roiled. It was bad enough that a divorced woman with a child had to spend the next twenty years somehow getting along with her ex-husband. Now she, Lynn Chanak, had gone one better: she had to get along with a man she hadn’t chosen, even if foolishly. A man she’d never married, never made love with—a total stranger. All for the sake of the child they shared.

For better or worse, they were tied together until Shelly and Rose were grown.

How bizarre did it get?

LYNN MADE THE LONG, winding trip back over the coastal range to the Pacific Ocean and home. Her instinct was to collect Shelly right away, to reassure herself by her daughter’s presence that nothing would ever change, that they were a family.

But there were things she didn’t want Shelly to hear, and she should make some phone calls first.

She got Brian’s answering machine and started to leave a halting message, feeling like an idiot. Why was she always taken aback when the beep sounded and she had to talk onto a tape? But this time she’d barely begun when he picked up the phone.

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“I, um, I told you I’d found her.”

“Our daughter.”

“Yes.” She took a breath. “Today I saw pictures of her. She has your eyes. And my hair.”

Strangely, what flitted into her mind at that moment wasn’t the photo, but rather the potent way Adam Landry’s gaze had touched her and the grit in his voice when he said, “She looks like you.”

“How do you know this is the right kid?” her ex-husband, the true stranger, said with an audible sneer.

Closing her eyes, Lynn said evenly, “We’ve had DNA testing done. And you’d know, if you saw her.”

He grunted. “So what do you want from me?”

“Nothing.” How glad she was to be able to say that! “I thought you should know. That’s all.”

“Uh-huh. Well, you do what you want.” His tone changed. “Hey, my call-waiting beeped. Hold on.” When he came back on a minute later, Brian said, “You don’t have her there, right?”

“The man who has been raising her didn’t hand her over to me, if that’s what you mean.”

Brian being Brian, he stayed focused on all that he cared about. “Well, I’m not paying any more child support. I mean, Shelly’s not my responsibility. And I’m not paying this other guy, I can tell you that.”

How could she ever have married this man? How had she deceived herself, even for a while, into thinking she loved him?

“You held Shelly and kissed her and changed her diaper. She thinks you’re her daddy. After all these years, don’t you love her at all?” Lynn asked, trying to understand.

“She’s not my kid,” he explained, as though she was an idiot not to grasp the concept immediately. “Maybe it’s different for a woman. But for a guy…hey, we want to pass on our own bloodlines. I mean, sure, Shelly’s a sweet kid. But she’s got a dad now, right?”

“That’s lucky for her, isn’t it?” Lynn carefully, gently, hung up the telephone receiver.

However much she feared Adam Landry, he had to be a better father than the man she’d married.

She picked up the phone again and dialed quickly. Her mother answered on the second ring.

“Mom, I saw her picture today.”

“Oh, honey,” her mother said, compassion brimming in her voice. “I wish we were there. I can hardly wait to meet her. And to cuddle Shelly and make sure she knows we’ll always be Grandma and Grandpa.”

Just like that, tears spilled hotly from Lynn’s eyes. “Oh, Mom.” She sniffed. “I wish you could be here, too.”

Her mother had raised Lynn alone, but she’d remarried right after Lynn left home. Hal would never feel like “Dad” to Lynn, but he was a kind man who loved to be Grandpa. Lynn was grateful her mother had found him. She only wished his work hadn’t taken them to Virginia.

“For Christmas,” her mother said. “I promise we’ll come for Christmas.”

She gave a watery laugh. “I’ll hold out until then. No, really we’ll be fine.”

“Do you need money? We can help more than we have been, you know. If we have to, we’ll take out a loan.”

Lynn’s mother and stepfather had loaned her the seed money for the bookstore and her mortgage on this old house. She wasn’t going to take another cent from them. She knew darn well they didn’t really have it.

“No, money’s not the problem,” she said, meaning it. “It’s just…everything.”

“Then tell me everything,” her mother said comfortingly. “And we’ll see which parts of it really count.”

Lynn saw herself suddenly, a child. What grade had she been in? Third or fourth? The teacher had accused her of cheating, and she hadn’t been! Goody Two-shoes that she was, she never would. She’d been humiliated and hurt that Mrs. Sanders hadn’t believed her. All the way home, she’d dragged her feet. What if Mom didn’t believe her, either?

She found her mother in the kitchen. Unable to speak, she began crying. Funny how clearly she remembered every sensation of her mother’s embrace, the soothing warmth of her voice. “Tell me what’s wrong,” Mom had murmured, “and we’ll see which parts of it really count.”

Mom had always said that, when troubles seemed overwhelming. And her analysis invariably did help. She brought problems down to size.

Well, not even Mom was going to be able to shrink this one.

But she told her mother everything anyway, the way she always did.

THIS WAS THE SECOND toughest phone call Adam had ever had to make. Both to his parents-in-law.

He probably should have told them these past weeks what was going on, so that they could absorb the shock slowly, as he apparently had.

But he hadn’t wanted to alarm them. It might all come to nothing. Jenny Rose was all they had left of their Jennifer. They always called her Jenny, and sometimes he was sorry he’d named his daughter after her mother. He’d turn, half-expecting to see Jennifer. Besides, Rosebud shouldn’t have to live up to such an intense emotional demand. She wasn’t her mother, and shouldn’t have to fill Jennifer’s shoes. Her own were enough, right?

So he hadn’t told them. Unfortunately, the time had come. Some things couldn’t be avoided forever.

“Mom,” he said carefully, when Angela McCloskey answered the phone.

“Adam, dear! Oh, I was just thinking about you. And Jenny, of course.” She chuckled. “Christmas is coming, you know.”

It was barely autumn. Adam was interested in how retailers did in November and December, but he didn’t do his own shopping until the last week or two before Christmas. How hard was it to take a day and fill the trunk of his car?

He made a noncommittal sound. “Mom, something has happened.” At her intake of breath, he regretted his choice of words. “Rose is fine. Nothing like that. The thing is…” Oh, hell. He didn’t know how to be anything but blunt, but instinct told him he needed to edge into this.

“What?” His tone had given something away. His mother-in-law sounded scared.

“There was a mix-up at the hospital.”

“Not Jenny’s…Jenny’s ashes.”

“No,” he said hastily, then closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Not Jenny. Rose. We’ve, uh, had DNA testing done. Rose isn’t my biological daughter. Or Jennifer’s.”

“Rose isn’t…I don’t understand.” She was pleading with him.

How well he knew the feeling. He’d begged God himself. Some prayers weren’t answered.

“The other mother and I met today. We…exchanged pictures.”

“You’ve found her, then?” Angela latched on to the idea with frightening, pitiful eagerness. “Our Jenny’s little girl?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll be bringing her home, won’t you?”

He pinched his nose again. “Mom, we’re taking it slowly. This mother…she loves Shelly. That’s the girl’s name. Shelly Schoening. And I love Rose.”

“We do, too, of course,” she agreed, but he heard no conviction in her voice. “But…but Jenny’s daughter. You can’t leave her to be raised by someone else.”

“How can I not?” he said brutally. “I wouldn’t trade Rose away, even if I could.”

His mother-in-law was crying now, he could hear hitches of breath, the salty pain in her voice. “No…but our granddaughter…”

“I hope you’ll still think of Rose that way.”

“Jennifer was all we had.”

How well he knew!

Gently he said, “I’ll try to arrange for you to meet Shelly as soon as possible. The, uh, mother seems like a decent woman.” He still had his doubts, but he wasn’t sharing them with Angela, reeling from one blow already. “I can’t imagine that she won’t be willing to involve you in Shelly’s life.”

“Shelly! That wasn’t even on Jenny’s list of possible names.”

“No, but it’s pretty, isn’t it?” he soothed. Had she even heard him?

“Yes, I suppose. Adam…”

“We have to take it slow. For the girls’ sake.”

“Does she know?”

“She” wasn’t Rose, he guessed, anger stirring. “Neither Rose nor Shelly has been told. They’re really too young to understand. We’ve agreed to meet, get to know the other child, so it’s less frightening when they have to be told.”

“You’re just going to leave her?” Fixated, his mother-in-law made it sound as if he was deserting his own flesh and blood.

“I am not going to wrench her from the only home she’s ever known, if that’s what you mean,” Adam said evenly. “We’ll see what happens. You’ve got to be patient.”

“We want to meet her.”

He suppressed a profanity. “I’ll try.”

But he saw suddenly that he couldn’t let them near Shelly too soon. They couldn’t be trusted not to tell her they were Grandma and Grandpa. And, God! When they saw her resemblance to Jennifer…

He got off the phone after a dozen more promises he didn’t mean. He paced his office, anger and pity and intense frustration churning in his belly. Rose had just lost her grandparents, he knew. Angela and Rob McCloskey would say the right things, but without meaning them. He wondered about the other grandparents. Would they be as desperate to meet Rose?

His own parents wouldn’t be, he knew. Not especially warm with him, they were pleasant and remote with Rose. One or the other might become interested when Rose reached school age if she displayed a real spark of artistic ability—Mom—or a powerful interest in anatomy or oceanography— Dad.

Adam made the call nonetheless. For better or worse, they were his parents.

His mother listened without interrupting.

Only when he was done did she ask, “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

He couldn’t believe he’d hurt her feelings. “I wanted to be sure.”

“Is going further with this a good idea?” she asked unexpectedly. “Rose is a sweet child. I don’t see how this can end happily for her.”

Adam assured her that he wasn’t going to let anybody take his Rosebud from him. But she’d stirred a different kind of uneasiness that ate at him from the moment he set the phone down in its cradle again.

Saturday seemed a century away and, at the same time, too close. What would he feel when he saw her, that little girl with his eyes and Jennifer’s face? Would there be some instant connection? In a way, he hoped not. He didn’t want anything to affect his love for Rose. To lessen it. Emotions shouldn’t be so insubstantial. They shouldn’t be dependent on blood tests or facial features.

It had unnerved him, though, to see how much of Rose had come from her mother. That hair. On the ride down in the elevator, it had been all he could do not to touch it, see whether the texture was the same as Rose’s.

The sweetness of her face had stunned him. He’d arrived certain he would hate her, but how could he hate someone who looked like his Rosebud?

Now he didn’t know what to think of her. Her ex-husband had thought her capable of having an affair, which didn’t speak very well for her morals. And yet, she’d defended her Shelly as fiercely as he had his Rose. Whatever her other flaws, she seemed genuinely to love the little girl she’d raised.

Or had it all been an act?

He sank into the leather chair behind his wide bird’s-eye maple desk and cursed. How could he know? How could he trust her?

Did he have any choice?

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