changed her mind and came back for her daughter, but they said no, certainly not.
The “certainly not” had stuck in his craw. Miriam had trusted him. Why couldn’t they?
But there were laws and regulations and he knew that he really couldn’t raise Marissa on his own. So he’d made them promise that she would be placed in a good home.
Daniel had kissed the top of Marissa’s little red head and handed her over, and that was the last time he’d seen her.
Until now.
And the mom they’d picked out for Marissa did look like a pretty good mom. Kimberly was pretty, and seemed caring. He noticed the furrow in her brow as she fretted silently over Marissa. She was worried. But she wasn’t saying anything, just giving Marissa time to absorb what Daniel had told her.
“Really? You remember?” Marissa asked. Again, there was a tremor in her voice.
“As if it was yesterday.”
He tore his gaze away from the girl’s face, her expression so unreadable that he couldn’t be sure if what he was saying was helping or hurting. Daniel turned to look at Kimberly.
Now, she was an open book. Her eyes, that curious blue, were bright with unshed tears. Her throat was working, and he could tell she was moved by the moment.
Had to be hard, helping her adopted daughter revisit the day she came into the world. Did Kimberly envy that mother? Envy the chance to have given birth to Marissa herself? Or was she afraid that Marissa would leave her in search of her birth mom?
“I have a picture,” he said, his voice husky.
“A picture?” The words exploded from both Marissa and Kimberly. They stared at each other, their eyes wide with excitement.
“Can we see it?” Kimberly asked.
“Yeah. Sure. Come on. It’s in my office.”
Inside, Marissa glanced around the tiny office, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Kimberly was more patient, and he noticed how she laid a light hand on her daughter’s shoulder. Its fluttering movement seemed to comfort the clearly anxious Marissa.
He grabbed up the photo of him and Marissa and extended it to her. “See? I told you that you were tiny.”
She stared down. “Oh.” Disappointment was plain on her face. “I thought...I thought it would be of me and my birth mom.”
But Kimberly had taken the photo from Marissa and was staring down at it. She traced her finger over the image, her mouth softly parted. A tear snaked down her cheek, and Daniel liked the way she let it be.
She looked up at Daniel. “This is you. With Marissa.”
“Yeah. The guys took it. Right before I had to hand her over. DFCS said they’d find her a good home. Looks as if they did. I mean, I asked if I could keep you,” he blurted out to Marissa, “but I mean, who was I kidding. I was a twenty-five-year-old unmarried guy, a rookie firefighter. Who was gonna trust me with a kid, huh?”
Marissa’s eyebrows skyrocketed. “My mom was twenty-five when she adopted me. And she was single.”
Something about that twisted in him. He shot a questioning look toward Kimberly, and she nodded. “Yeah, but, Marissa, at first I was just a foster parent. Besides, I’d already gone through all the foster-care paperwork and the classes, and they’d done a home study. Plus...you were listed as a special-needs baby. They needed somebody who would take you, no questions asked.”
“Yeah. I forgot about all that.” She leaned over her mother’s shoulder and studied the photo. “Hey, I was kinda cute. I thought babies were ugly.”
“You were beautiful. Tiny. But beautiful. Except...” Daniel scratched his head as he recalled the bruises he’d left on her pale pink skin. Other bruises, that the EMTs shrugged off, had started popping up, as well. Part of the birthing process, they’d assured him.
Just then the “ennnh” of the fire alarm’s buzzer reverberated through the building, and the radio crackled to life. He listened, took in the bare facts: multicar accident on the interstate, gas-tank leak, trapped driver.
“Sorry,” he told Kimberly and Marissa. “This will have to wait.”
And then he was out the door, trying to focus on the fire call, the person trapped in the vehicle, that dry westerly breeze that could make fires on the interstate get out of hand with hair-raising speed.
But as he pulled on the last of his turnout gear and swung into the station’s extended cab pickup with his captain at the wheel, he caught sight of Kimberly and Marissa’s faces.
His gaze fixed on their expressions as Dave, his captain, peeled out behind the fire engine.
Marissa’s was typical tweenager, like his nieces and nephews, her eyes alive with curiosity and excitement.
Kimberly? Her fingers went to her mouth, her brow creased ever so slightly and her eyes were dark with worry as they locked with his. She knew the life. The risks. The fact that even with routine calls, there were never any guarantees.
He didn’t know how Kimberly knew, but her eyes held that same look that Ma’s had every time his dad had left the table to answer a call.
And he didn’t know how he felt about having someone he’d barely met worrying that much about him.
“YOU’RE SURE YOU don’t mind waiting?” Kimberly asked Marissa as they sat on the front bench in front of the fire station. They’d passed some of the time in the chief’s office, but the cramped confines had seemed to make Marissa more restless, so Kimberly had suggested a change of scene. “The secretary said that it could take a while.”
“I wish I could have gone with them!” Marissa enthused. “You know, see them cut the car up. Mrs. Karen—” she jabbed a finger back toward the station and the secretary’s office “—she said they had to use the Jaws of Life. Man, wouldn’t that be cool, Mom? To see them save somebody’s life?”
Kimberly shuddered. She’d already picked up enough of the garbled radio traffic to understand that the woman driver was in critical condition and that the extrication was taking longer than Daniel had anticipated.
No, when she thought about the accident, all Kimberly could picture was Marissa trapped in that car, critically injured, dying—it could have been them on that very interstate. She shook herself and purposefully focused her mind away from the grim vision and onto appreciating her good fortune.
Maybe they should leave and come back. Daniel would likely be tired and not in the mood for pesky questions when he returned. And wouldn’t he have loads of paperwork? She needed him to be as cooperative as possible so that she could pick up any facts that might lead her to Marissa’s birth mother. It was important.
No. She thought again about that woman trapped in the car. It was critical to find Marissa’s birth mother.
“Maybe I could be a firefighter,
