the records that might have given you a clue are long gone.”
Maybe not, she thought. Maybe someone had claimed them, stored them. Something. But she wasn’t going to deal with that now.
“For the time being, I’m going to stay where I’ll do the most good, right here with my mother.” She noted how he smiled when she still referred to Julia as her mother. “I’m putting in for a leave of absence so I can be with her for as long as I can. After she gets well, we’ll see.”
Unlike his colleagues, he believed in dispensing hope if there was even so much as a shred to be had. But even he couldn’t find it within his heart to allow her to deceive herself like this. “Cate, you know that she might not get well.”
Cate squared her shoulders, the look in her eyes forbidding him to say anything more. “Please,” she whispered the word quietly, “I’m dealing with one truth at a time.”
Two and a half weeks later, Cate found herself standing at her mother’s gravesite. It was raining, which seemed somehow fitting. She’d been angry at the sun for daring to shine the day of her father’s funeral so many years ago.
She was only vaguely aware that her partner, James Wong, was holding an umbrella over her head, keeping her dry. Vaguely aware of the world in general. She felt as if she was walking along on the outside of a huge circle, looking in.
She’d refused the Valium Doc Ed had offered her just before the ceremony. She didn’t want to be any more numb than she already was. Numb from the loss of a woman she’d loved with all her heart and had thought of as her mother to the very end, despite everything.
Numb from the realization that she’d been lied to for the past twenty-seven years of her life.
Numb because there were no foundations beneath her feet, no walls around her to protect her. She was bare and exposed. Completely and utterly adrift in dark waters. And for the first time in her life, she had no sense of identity. She had no idea who she was, or who she might have been meant to be.
She wouldn’t know anything until she found the answers to the questions that had been battering her brain for the past two and a half weeks.
Ever since that day in her mother’s hospital room.
Just before the end, her mother had begged her to forgive her and of course she had. She bore no malice toward the people who had done everything in their power to make her feel loved and secure. But it didn’t negate her desire to discover her birth parents and, with them, her roots.
Cate realized that the priest had stopped talking. The ceremony was almost over. Someone handed her a white rose. She went through the motions, kissing a petal and then throwing the flower onto the deep-mahogany casket that lay nestled in the freshly dug grave.
As she looked down, she felt her heart tightening within her chest.
Julia Kowalski had died three days ago. And now she and Big Ted were together again.
And she was alone. Completely alone. With no family to fall back on.
Neither one of her parents had had any siblings. Cate had always thought of herself as the only child of only children. Now she no longer knew what to think, what to feel.
Except for alone.
Everyone gathered at her parents’ house after the funeral. Betsy Keller, her mother’s best and oldest friend, had taken over and handled all the arrangements. Had insisted on it.
“You have enough to deal with, poor thing,” she’d clucked sympathetically several times during the past three days.
The mother of six and grandmother of nine, Betsy took to traffic control easily. Rather than call in a caterer, she’d summoned the collective resources of all of Julia’s friends. The women had brought over casseroles, pies, cakes and enough food to feed two armies.
“You’ve got to eat something,” Betsy insisted. She paused to deliver the same entreaty every time their paths crossed within the crammed house filled with people who had loved Julia and Ted.
And each time, Cate would respond the same way. “Maybe later.”
Betsy would peer at her through her red-rimmed glasses. “All right, but I’ll be watching you.”
Cate forced a smile to her lips. She tried to cheer herself up with the fact that her mother had been well loved by a great many people. Both her parents had been. And she was going to miss them terribly, but it was going to take her some time to get over the fact that they had deceived her. That they hadn’t had enough faith in her to know that she wasn’t about to pick up and go searching for her birth parents the moment she knew of their existence.
She wouldn’t have then. But, she had to now. Now that she had no roots. No family to call her own. Maybe it was a failing, she thought, but she needed to feel part of something. Something other than the bureau.
She made eye contact with James, who was there with his wife and oldest son. Her partner started to come over, but she shook her head and James faded back, giving her space.
As she stood, looking at people exchanging pleasantries, catching up on one another’s lives, she became aware that someone had come up to join her. She began to move away but felt something being slipped into her hand.
“What’s this?” Cate looked down at the brown manila envelope Doc Ed had just given her.
“Everything that I know about your adoption. It’s not much, but it might give you a start.” Slipping his arm around her slim shoulders, he said, “I know you people at the bureau have ways of finding things out as long as you have some kind of starting point.”
The envelope was light. It couldn’t contain much. “We don’t use government resources for personal ends.”
His gray eyes twinkled for the first time in three days. He gave her a fatherly squeeze. “Yeah, and I’m sure there are ways around that, too, Catherine. Now, eat something before I have you strapped down to a gurney and fed intravenously.”
She looked down at the manila envelope again. The smile that rose to her lips was only slightly forced, far less than what she’d been displaying all day as well-wishers pumped her hand, gave their condolences and told her stories about her parents.
“Yes, sir.”
He took hold of her arm and steered her toward one of the two tables laden down with food. “If you think I’m going to be taken in by that, then you don’t really know me, either.”
She appreciated the irony he’d tossed her way.
Chapter 5
Dr. Lukas Graywolf quietly tiptoed up behind his wife in the Wedgwood-blue tiled bathroom of their modest Southern California home. He slipped his arm around her waist and buried his face in the nape of her neck. Taking a deep breath, he inhaled the fragrance that still clung to her skin from her morning shower, an event he sorely regretted missing.
“So how’s the bureau’s sexiest extra-special agent this morning?”
He’d startled her. Lost in thought and rushing, Lydia Wakefield Graywolf hadn’t realized
