can you say that?”
“It’s what I’ve been telling myself more than half my life.”
It was the only way she’d survived without him.
“Do you really believe that?”
They were traveling backward again—to places that hurt a great deal.
“I believe I want to hear the rest of your story.”
He studied her a moment longer and then, to her relief, he continued.
“My mom called the adoption agency for me and a couple of weeks later I came home from school to find a letter waiting. It told us your name, and that you lived in Maricopa.”
A town just outside Montgomery County, near Dayton. A little over an hour from Columbus. She’d grown up there.
Ryan had been born there.
He pulled a document out of his back pocket and handed it to her. “And there was this.” A copy of his birth certificate. The official one with her name on it, next to the words Baby Boy Lindsay. That piece of paper would only have been released to one person—her son.
“I came to Columbus to go to Ohio State, got married and never left,” she said inanely, so disoriented she couldn’t think straight.
He nodded. “I know.”
There it was again. That knowledge he had.
“You never wanted to contact me?” God, she sounded pathetic. And the question was completely unfair.
He grimaced, shrugged. “Sure I did—some of the time. But I knew you were married. I didn’t know if he knew about me, or if you’d welcome the idea of a potentially painful reminder from your past showing up on your doorstep.”
“I would have welcomed you. Instantly. Any time.”
She couldn’t speak for Brent. Wouldn’t speak for him. They didn’t share the same feelings about children.
Hers. Or anyone else’s.
Though, for years, she’d thought they had.
“I also didn’t want to hurt my folks,” Ryan admitted next. “They were completely open about finding you, but I could tell my mom was a little worried, too.”
Understandably. Sara had a strong urge to meet the woman who’d been such a good mother to the boy she’d birthed. To tell her thank you. And to tell her not to worry.
To find out if the woman could accept her—or if she hated her. To find out if some of the jealousy she’d avoided acknowledging all these years could be put to rest.
But what if it intensified?
“Do they know you’re contacting me now?”
She’d jumped ahead. There was so much in between.
“Yes.”
That was all. Nothing more.
“I was kind of geeky growing up,” Ryan said then, obviously sensing that they had to go back to go forward. “I played Little League and high school football….”
“Were you good at it?”
“Good enough.” He shook his head, as if his sports successes were inconsequential. “I enjoyed playing, and my father encouraged it, but what I loved most was reading. And surfing the Net.”
“AOL would have been in full swing by the time you were in high school.”
“I was a junkie on Genie,” he said, naming an Internet connection source that had been out of business for several years.
“I’m assuming you know what I do for a living?”
“You’re executive director for NOISE, a national nonprofit organization that teaches Internet safety to kids, which your father, Sheriff John Lindsay, founded after his first book on the subject was published. You’re not supported by taxpayers’ money, but you get more than half of your funding through state-paid programs that contract your services.”
“Is there anything about me you don’t know?”
He glanced away and, for the first time since he’d come into her house, Sara felt uneasy with him there.
She realized she hadn’t called the office.
CHAPTER TWO
“EVERYTHING OKAY?” Ryan asked when Sara came back into the room and sat. He was sitting on the couch, right where she’d left him when she went to phone Donna. “Do you have to leave? I can come back another time.”
She shook her head, wondering how she was going to answer the questions her executive assistant was sure to ask when she finally did make it in to work. “I had an early flight from California this morning, so my schedule is clear until one.”
Everyone who knew her at all would find it odd that she wasn’t in the office, anyway—she’d been gone for three days.
But at the moment, she didn’t really care. For the first time in many years, the office, her father, what people thought of her, didn’t matter.
“Would you like something to drink?”
“I’m good, thanks.” He shook his head.
“You were starting at the beginning.”
“Yeah.” Head bowed, he didn’t speak right away. Then, looking up at her, he said, “This is kind of strange, isn’t it?”
Sara chuckled. “To say the least. I’m nothing to you—I don’t even know you. And yet I look at you, know that you’re my son and I feel like a mother. I’m thirty-seven years old and I don’t recognize myself.”
“I kinda feel like I know you, too.”
“Sounds like you know quite a bit about me.”
The thought was a comfort, given the seven years it had taken him to come and meet her.
“I’ve always loved puzzles, solving riddles and mysteries. When I was a kid I preferred old detective reruns to cartoons and all the action-hero shows the kids at school talked about.”
She could picture him, a much smaller version of the man sitting beside her, with skinny arms and legs, innocent eyes and the same freshly cut hair, lying on his stomach in front of a television set, his chin in his hands. The vision was so bittersweet it echoed the ache that accompanied her everywhere, every day.
“I don’t really know how it all started,” he continued. “It’s not like I ever made a conscious decision, but somehow, after I learned your name—and decided that I wasn’t going to try to see you—I started looking you up on the Internet.”
Sara’s chest tightened. Her
