He put his backpack on the back seat and hopped in. “I haven’t made any plans yet about where to stay.”
“I know,” she said. “I gather you’re one of those ‘wing it’ kind of guys.”
Again, feeling like it was a dig, he bit his tongue. “No,” he said mildly. “Like I said, my travel arrangements happened really fast, and I wasn’t sure where I would end up, nor what exactly I’d be doing up here.”
“Right,” she said.
“Will you tell me how you found out I was flying in today?”
“Your landlady,” she said briefly.
He stopped, thought about that, then nodded. “Of course Helen would do that.”
“Was it top secret?” Daniela asked.
“No, of course not,” he said with a half smile. “You just surprised me.”
“I used to work for dispatch,” she said quietly. “So it was within the realm of possibility that I could track you down.”
“Is that how you tracked me originally?” He wondered how he hadn’t known she worked for dispatch.
“No,” she said. “That was done through the child’s mother.”
Interesting how everybody avoided using Angel’s name. What a dichotomy that moniker was. “I didn’t realize you were in contact with Angel,” he said.
“I was briefly,” she said, “but only at the time of the adoption. I filed the information away and didn’t look at it until after Charlie died. Honestly she’s not someone I wanted to stay in contact with. It was hard to find her even then to finalize the paperwork. I had to go through multiple people until everything was taken care of.”
“You mean, multiple bars?”
She shot him a hard look. “If it was good enough for you to find her there, it was good enough for me to find her there too.”
He felt ashamed. “Look. Can we start again?” he said. “I’m Weston Thurlow, and I just arrived in Anchorage. I’m looking forward to meeting Sari and you.”
“Sari is looking forward to meeting you too,” Daniela said instantly. “And I’m Daniela Rogers. Pleased to meet you finally.”
He nodded. “Can we agree it was a bad deal from the beginning?”
“Did you really not know?” she asked curiously.
“I had no idea,” he said shortly. “I wasn’t very happy when I found out.” When she sucked in her breath, he turned toward her. “But not for the reason you think.” When Daniela didn’t say anything, he forged on. “Look. If I’d known she was pregnant, I would have been there. I don’t know if we’d have been together, but I’d have been there. Or, even later, when she decided to bail, I’d have taken responsibility for that baby in a minute, if I’d known.”
At that Daniela made a startled exclamation and glanced at him. “Seriously?”
He shot her a hard look. “Absolutely. That’s my flesh and blood, and she was given away without me even knowing she existed. How do you think I felt?”
She gave him a second shocked look and then returned to driving, but her face twisted with an expression he didn’t know her well enough to understand. “When did you find out?”
“After the adoption was already done,” he said quietly. “Angel called me up when she was drunk one night and told me what she’d done. She kept all the details to herself, just letting me know enough to twist the knife.”
Again Daniela’s breath caught in her throat. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s a hard way to find out you have a child.”
“Had a child. And it was a devastatingly hard way to find out. I’ve wanted to wring Angel’s neck for what she did but couldn’t trust myself to be up here.”
“You apparently feel strongly about it.”
“If you had lost a child, wouldn’t you?” He knew his words were wrong when her face blanched. A split-second later he realized that a woman who adopted somebody else’s child likely had done so because she couldn’t have any of her own.
She gave a clipped nod, and, even though her face was pale, she answered in a controlled tone. “I would have been devastated,” she said softly. “I, um, I can’t have any children, which is why I adopted Sari.”
“Of course,” he said. “I really appreciate that you gave her a home.”
Daniela looked over at the stranger in her truck. She’d used a lot of persuasion to let his landlady know what their connection was and why she needed to meet him at the airport. So far, he’d rebuffed all her efforts to come meet Sari, but it was for Sari’s sake that she was doing this.
At least she thought so. Maybe it was for her own. She didn’t want to examine that too closely. But since her husband’s death, Sari hadn’t been the same child. It had been hard on the little girl. There was also guilt involved because Daniela had experienced a certain amount of relief knowing Charlie was gone. And how horrible was that?
She stole another sideways glance at the stranger beside her. She shouldn’t call him a stranger, since he was the father of her child, and didn’t that sound more intimate than it was? She shook her head ever-so-slightly, hoping he wouldn’t notice. As she tried to toss off the thoughts confusing her, she glanced at him again. “Are you okay to stay at my place for a night or two, while you get your feet on the ground?”
He shrugged. “It was great that you picked me up. You certainly don’t have to give me a place to stay.”
“But I have to,” she said, “otherwise you might not come over.”
He winced at that.
She didn’t want to be mean, but, at the same time, she needed to know if there was any connection between her daughter and her daughter’s father.
