curled her fingers into her hands, as if to clutch what little power she had left. Silence blanketed the room. The only break was the sound of her mother’s labored breathing.
Say it isn’t so, Mama. Tell me I’m your little girl, your own flesh and blood. Yours and Daddy’s.
Cate remained by the door for a moment longer, trying to absorb everything she could about the woman. Holding off that first bite from the apple a moment longer.
She was acutely aware, not for the first time, that her mother and she didn’t look at all alike. Julia Kowalski was a short woman with dark brown hair and lively hazel eyes. Until this illness had begun to eat away at her, her mother had been pleasantly plump and large boned, like her husband.
Cate had always been thin, delicate, even as a little girl, despite all her attempts to bulk up and be just like her father. She was small boned and deeply frustrated by it when she was younger. To comfort her, her father told her she took after his only sister, who had died before she reached her twentieth birthday.
“Josephine was a real beauty, just like you,” he’d tell her time and again.
And she’d been content that she looked like his sister, Josephine. Even when he could produce no photographs to back up his claim, it never occurred to her to doubt him.
Cate doubted him now. Doubted everything they had ever told her, and yet she still desperately hoped that she was just being paranoid. That her imagination was running away with her.
Years on the job did that to you, Cate thought. It heightened your senses and made you ready to take on anything. It also made you see things that weren’t really there. Full-blown figures where in reality only shadows existed.
Please let there be only shadows.
Cate took a deep breath and braced herself. It was time to test her bravery again. Time to cross another line in the sand. God knew she didn’t want to. But she had to.
“Mom, what was Doc Ed talking about just now?” To her own ear, her voice trembled slightly. She fisted her hands harder, dug her nails into her palms more deeply. “Why is our blood type incompatible?”
The smile on Julia’s lips was thin, weary, and yet somehow still just as warm now as it had been when Cate had been a little girl of eight. Back then, thunderstorms would frighten her, causing her to crawl into the shelter of her mother’s arms, begging to hear stories that would distract her. Her mother always obliged.
She wasn’t eight anymore, Cate thought sadly.
“You’re a smart girl, Catie.” Julia’s voice was thin, reedy. “You know why.”
Yes, Cate thought, she knew in her soul. But until she heard the actual words, she would remain in denial. She needed that kick in the butt to make her stop playing games with herself.
Cate pressed her lips together, hating this. “Tell me.”
Julia sighed. Passing a hand over her eyes, she willed her tears back. A couple seeped out, anyway. Because she was tethered to an IV, her movement was restricted. With another bracing sigh, Julia dropped her hand to the bed. It fell as if it was too heavy to hold up.
God, how she wished Teddy had listened to her. She’d told him that it was wrong to keep this from Catie. But he’d begged. It was one of the very few times he’d asked anything of her and she couldn’t deny him, even though she knew it was wrong. Teddy had been and always would remain her childhood sweetheart, the man with the key to her heart.
With effort, Julia forced words past her lips, trying not to let the very act exhaust her. “Your father and I loved you from the moment we saw you.”
“Tell me, Mama.”
And so Julia said the words she’d promised her husband never to say. But he wasn’t here now, and if Teddy was looking down, she told herself he’d understand. “You were adopted, Catie.” She channeled every last bit of strength into her voice, determined to make Cate understand. And forgive. “You came into our lives when you were just a week old, but you were always part of us.”
In her heart, she begged Cate not to be angry at the grave omission that had been made. Julia fisted one frail hand and placed it against her breast.
“I didn’t get to carry you beneath my heart, the way your birth mother did. But I held you there when you cried because the other kids made fun of you, or when that boy you liked so much asked another girl out. I held you to my heart when your father died—and he was your father. Just as you are my daughter, Catie. In love, in spirit and in fact. In every way but the mechanics of birth.” Pushing a button on the hospital bed, Julia drew herself up as best she could, a pale shadow of the vivacious woman she’d once been. “No one could have loved you more than your father and I did. No one,” she underscored as fiercely as she could.
“It’s okay, Mama, it’s okay.”
On legs that were less than solid, Cate crossed to the lone bed in the room and took her mother’s hand. She didn’t want her to become agitated and waste what precious little strength she still had left.
Even as Cate held her mother’s hand, she could feel everything around her cracking, breaking. Shattering and raining down around her like tiny shards of glass. Cate struggled to understand why her parents would keep this from her. Were they ashamed of her, of how she had come into their lives?
Julia wrapped her fingers tightly around Cate’s, afraid to let go. Afraid that the young woman she’d loved for the past twenty-seven years would walk out the door and never come back.
But that isn’t my Catie. Catie would never leave.
“But why didn’t you ever tell me?” Cate asked.
A ragged sigh escaped Julia’s lips. “That was your father’s decision. He was afraid to let you know. When I tried to argue him out of it, he made me promise that I would never tell you.” Julia tried to read her daughter’s expression, but Cate had on what she’d once teased was her special agent face, the one that gave nothing away. Julia proceeded cautiously, as if every step on the tightrope might be her last. “Your father loved you so much, he said it would kill him if someday you wanted to go away to find your real parents.”
Digging her elbows into the mattress, Julia struggled to sit up. Shifting pillows, Cate propped her up. Julia offered her a weary smile of thanks. “We were your real parents, your father and I.”
“I know.” Cate said the words because her mother expected them. Because up until a few minutes ago, they had been true. But they weren’t now. There was a hollowness opening up inside of her, a hollowness that threatened to swallow her whole. It took everything she had not to let it register on her face.
Doggedly, Cate pressed as much as she dared. “But after Daddy died…?” She paused, searching for words. Trying desperately to absolve the woman she’d thought of as her mother. “Why didn’t you tell me then?”
A helpless look entered the hazel eyes. “You were fifteen and I didn’t know how to tell you. I did try, though, several times. But every time an occasion opened up, I realized that, like your father, I was afraid, too. You have to understand, after he died, you were all I had. I didn’t want to lose you.”
After her father died, she and her mother had grown closer. So close that when
