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…”
