“What was wrong with your mother?”
“Leukemia.” The momentary hesitation and the slight press of her lips together was his only hint at the extent of her inner turmoil. The woman took a breath before she continued. “She died a little more than a week after that.”
“I’m sorry.” The words were not said automatically. Christian meant them genuinely. He had never learned how to separate himself from the sting of death, and though it made things difficult for him, he hoped he never could. If he were anesthetized to loss, it would rob him of his compassion.
Cate tried to shrug nonchalantly and couldn’t quite pull it off. The wound her mother’s death had caused was still too new, too raw. Even when she was angry with Julia Kowalski for the secret she had kept too long, there was still this huge hurt in her heart that her mother, the woman she’d loved and cherished, fought with and learned from for twenty-seven years, was gone. The thought, too, that she was no longer anyone’s child, but an adult in every sense of the word, was still new, still unwelcome.
“Yes,” she said quietly, “me, too.”
“Did your mother make a deathbed confession before she died?”
The irony of that still got to her. “She wouldn’t have even made that if it hadn’t been for the blood incompatibility.”
Not for the first time, she thought about how Julia Kowalski might have gone to her grave with the secret and she would have never known the truth. And subsequently she would have been at peace instead of feeling betrayed.
Maybe the truth was highly overrated. But now that she’d begun this, she couldn’t back away. She always needed to know. Everything. That had always been both her failing and her strength, the need to know, to fit in every piece of the puzzle.
Cate looked at him, her eyes capturing his. “How would you have liked to wake up one day to discover that your whole life was a lie? That you weren’t who you thought you were? That your parents weren’t your parents, that you weren’t a hundred percent Polish with just a hint of French, but God only knew what?”
Her eyes were stinging again. When was she going to get over this? she demanded silently. When was her anger going to burn away the tears?
“Do you have any idea how many stupid Polish jokes I had to endure while I was growing up? And I did it all for no reason. I’m not Polish. There was no great-great-grandmother who was an impoverished French countess. There’s nothing but this huge question mark,” she added.
She had an energy about her when she became animated. He found it difficult to look away. “So you’ve set out to erase that. The question mark in your life. What makes you think Joan’s your mother? Did your adoptive mother tell you?”
“No.” Cate’s mouth curved ever so slightly in a self-deprecating smile that did not reach her sad eyes. “I tracked her down. It’s what I do.”
And at least that much she was sure of. She was sure of her abilities. Everything else was up for grabs.
“Then you are sure.”
The deep baritone voice echoed in the room. Cate set down the coffee cup. There was a restlessness stirring within her. Cate attributed it to her less-than-successful encounter with her birth mother and was annoyed with herself. She usually had better control over herself than that.
She was also vaguely aware that the stirrings became more pronounced when Joan’s doctor was looking at her. It had been a long time since she’d even noticed a good-looking man.
Cate shifted in her seat. It did no good. She felt as uncomfortable in her own skin now as she did a moment ago. “I’d need a DNA test to be positive, I suppose. But Mrs. Cunningham didn’t exactly look inclined to submit to one of those.”
He could only imagine how having one bombshell after another dropped so quickly must have affected Joan. “This isn’t a good time for her.”
She looked at the doctor for a long moment. He hadn’t told her before when she’d asked, but the boundaries had changed. She tried again. “Why is she here?”
He was surprised that he was actually tempted to tell her. Christian attributed the momentary lapse to the sad look in the young woman’s eyes. A look he doubted if she even knew she possessed. A look he was particularly vulnerable to. But vulnerable or not, there were ethics to adhere to. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”
Cate blew out a breath, banking down frustration. “Doctor-patient privilege, yes, I know all about that stumbling block.” If at first… She tried another approach. “What kind of a doctor are you?”
“A good one, I’d like to think.”
The hint of amusement in his eyes got to her for a second. It was almost as if there’d been a tiny tidal wave in the middle of her stomach. The meeting with her birth mother had really shaken her up more than she was willing to admit. She focused on fact finding, something she usually did well.
“From the sound of it, at least a slippery one. Normally I’d attribute that kind of an answer to a shrink, but psychiatrists generally don’t walk around with stethoscopes slung around their necks—unless they’re into shock therapy,” she added dryly.
The seconds ticked away and he had to be getting down to his office, but something about her made him linger just a few minutes longer. He saw no harm in telling her his discipline.
“I’m a gynecologist.”
Her mind quickly flipped through the conditions attached to his specialty. “Only two things would have a woman as upset as Mrs. Cunningham looked even before I told her who I was. A change-of-life baby…” Her voice trailed off as something far worse occurred to her. “Oh, God, it’s cancer, isn’t it?”
He saw distress before she could mask it. He thought of what had to be going through her head. To find her birth mother, only to think she was losing her again. It made him want to tell her that things were being handled. But to say that, he would have had to admit that there was something wrong. And his allegiance was to his patient, not the blonde sitting beside him.
Christian shook his head. “I can’t tell you.”
She hated not knowing, hated being shut out. Frustration had her fisting her hands in her lap. “What can you tell me?”
“That if this is on the level and for some inner peace you need to have Joan accept you as her daughter, that you take this slowly. Let her get used to the idea,” he advised.
That would be his approach, it always had been. Slow and steady. Only once in his life had he jumped in with both feet, and that was to threaten Alma’s father to keep away from her.
“If Joan is your mother the way you say,” he added as he saw the protest rise to her lips, “she probably thought she’d never see you again. She certainly didn’t expect you to pop up on what she undoubtedly feels is one of the darkest days of her life.”
Was he doing that on purpose, teasing her with information he wouldn’t give her? No, she doubted that. Gut instincts told her that this was a man who didn’t tease. Too bad. The thought came from nowhere and she had no idea why it materialized in her brain. She began to entertain the thought that, just possibly, she was going a little crazy. Who could blame her?
