there was actually a long period of time when nobody pieced together the sad story of my birth with the one about a young widow working on her doctorate in education.”
“Then you were made the headmistress of the most exclusive private school in the Asheville area, and somebody dug a little and made the connection.”
“And it came up again when I got this new position.”
His gaze was warm and locked with hers. “I didn’t mean to invade your privacy.”
“I have no privacy. Not since the morning a woman gave birth unexpectedly and left a premature baby in a hospital sink wrapped in a University of Georgia sweatshirt. There was very little chance I’d be left alone after that.”
He didn’t offer sympathy, for which she was grateful. “It was a lot more than I expected to find. All I wanted was some hint on how to approach you. Your educational philosophy, maybe.”
That struck her as funny, and she gave a low laugh, which broke the tension. “I’m sorry my history is so overwhelming.”
“I’m sorry it is, too,” he said with feeling. “But you’re the model for every kid who’s facing his own problems and doesn’t believe he’ll ever be able to make a success out of his life.”
“I gather the ‘he’ is meant to be Dawson?”
“Don’t you have a whole school full of Dawsons?”
“Well, not all of them are quite so recalcitrant.”
He sat back, as if the hard part was over. She appreciated that he’d been honest with her, and thought how unusual that was. He could so easily have pretended not to know anything.
“The story’s pretty old,” she said. “Exactly what did you ferret out?”
“What you just said. That you were left in a sink in a sweatshirt and nearly died of exposure before somebody heard you crying and found you.”
“Forever after to be known as the Sweatshirt Baby. That’s obviously where the name Georgia comes from, too. The shirt. You got that, right?”
He smiled as if he was relieved she wasn’t angry. “I did. Someone had a sense of humor.”
“I think they just called me Georgia at first as a kind of shorthand, and the name stuck. Later somebody put it on my birth certificate. It was the only legacy my mother bequeathed me. Other than leaving me in the sink instead of on the floor of a toilet stall, and wrapping me tightly in the sweatshirt, which probably saved my life.”
“They never found her?”
“Never did. It was a cause célèbre for a long time. Newspapers, magazines, cops, psychics. Everybody looked, but nobody was successful.”
She thought about the articles on her desk and the charm bracelet. “Nobody cares anymore,” she said, without the level of certainty she would have managed before that discovery. “Now when they trot out the story, it’s to show what a person can survive if she has the fortitude.”
“What did you survive?”
“Well, first I survived being more than two months premature and abandoned. Then I survived surgery to repair a faulty valve in my heart. By then most of the offers of adoption had waned, and the one that didn’t was from a couple with no experience raising children, much less a child who’d spent the first year and a half of her life connected to monitors and machines. They returned me to the state when I turned five.”
“That’s hard to fathom.”
Georgia couldn’t imagine it, either, but her fuzzy memories of those years weren’t happy, and now she thought she’d been lucky her adoptive parents had given up trying to raise her.
“After that I went to foster care and treatment programs because nobody had done me any favors emotionally. At eleven the state placed me on a farm with an experienced foster mom with four special-needs kids. Arabella was seventy-two, if you can believe that, and still full of energy. She sat me down and told me to make a list of all the things I planned to do to make her life miserable, so she could tell me why none of them would work. Then she said the only way I’d leave that placement was if she left first in a coffin, and she wanted me to know she would be watching her back.”
“Some woman.”
“Arabella saved my life. She had a gift for giving comfort and attention when it was needed and ignoring all of us when that was needed, too. She kept me so busy that I didn’t have the energy to run away or cause trouble. Eventually, for the first time, I felt safe. No one tried to smother me with pity or love. Arabella and the other children took whatever affection I could manage, and they didn’t expect anything more. From the moment I arrived, I was treated like I belonged there. Before long I did.”
Georgia realized how much she’d just said. She also realized that Lucas had wanted to hear it all, that her life actually interested him.
He affirmed her theory. “I’m betting that Arabella was the driving force behind your desire to help children with problems. What a role model.”
“Let’s talk about you. Are you up here because Asheville’s a good place to work on another novel?”
“But my life is so boring in comparison.”
“Let me be the judge.”
He gave a slight shrug and reached for another garlic knot. “The beginnings of another novel, yes, but something more interesting, too. A cookbook.”
“You cook, too? You write, you research, you cook?”
“My cop cooks. Zenzo’s a gourmet chef. When he’s not solving unspeakable crimes, he’s in the kitchen. My publisher got so many requests for Zenzo’s recipes they asked me to produce them.”
“You must cook, too. Surely they aren’t asking somebody who can’t boil an egg to write a gourmet cookbook. They would use a ghost writer.”
“I cook. Actually I cook well. I’m looking forward to cooking for you.”
Deep inside she could feel how quickly everything was proceeding. Yet as cautious as she normally was, she had no desire to put on the brakes. She was old enough, confident enough, to take a chance now. There had been men in her life since Samuel, but the relationships had, for the most part, been superficial. One, which had lasted nearly a year, had never reached the intimacy she felt tonight with Lucas. Not only was she entranced with the way one dimple creased his cheek and the way his hair swirled back from a slight widow’s peak, she was moved by the way they had simply slid into each other’s life stories. No fuss, no bother, no tension.
“I’ll look forward to your cooking,” she said. “But I won’t return that favor unless you’re a fan of grilled cheese and tomato soup.”
“Dawson,” he said, as if he was reminding both of them. “Let’s get him out of the way right now. I know you can’t talk about how he’s doing in school, but his mother’s talked to me. He’s ripping her heart to shreds. Nothing they do at home is making a difference. The thing is, I don’t think they’re doing the right things. They just clamp down harder and harder on him. His father only cares
