“Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?” ;
“It was something I was trying to forget,” Grace said.
“So… I’ mtrying to understand. Was it Pam’ sdeath that made you start thinking about this other baby? Realizing | that somewhere out there you had a child living with her :
adoptive parents? And I still don’t get it the part about Rory Taylor.
What’s going on between the two of you? “
So many questions, so much he still didn’t know.
“I , haven’t told you everything yet,” Grace said. God, she | hated saying all of this out loud. She’d gone over it in her own mind too many times to count, and, of course, she and Bonnie had revisited the experience over the years, ;
but to recite it this way gave it a terrible credibility. “Bonnie went to the store that morning,” she said, “and when she came back, she was very quiet. I thought maybe she just felt guilty about her role in getting me to give the baby to Nancy. She tried to get me to eat something, but I just couldn’t. I’d never felt so despondent. I wanted to die.” She looked at Eddie.
“It was the same as I felt after S Pamela died.”
Eddie covered her hand with his, and she didn’t pull J away.
“Me, too,” he said. The two words cut through her. | She had given him no comfort, no sympathy after Pamela | died. Only blame and recriminations. <|
“Bonnie finally started talking,” she said.
“She told me that when she was in the little market, everyone was talking about a newborn baby girl that had been found on the beach very early that morning.”
“Oh no.” Eddie tightened his grip on her hand.
“The store clerk told Bonnie the baby had been found dead. When Bonnie told me that” -Grace shut her eyes at the memory “—I was torn apart, Eddie. I’d wanted that baby. I’d been willing to turn my life inside out for her. But I thought the nurse might be right, and I’d trusted her. And she went and left my baby on the beach to be washed away like a piece of driftwood.”
“Oh, Grace,” Eddie said.
“How awful.”
“So, Bonnie called me early this summer and said that she’d found out that Rory Taylor wanted to do an episode on his True Life Stories show about that baby. He was going to look into how she came to be on the beach that morning.”
“So, you contacted him and told him you thought you were the mother?”
Eddie asked.
“No,” Grace said, horrified by the thought.
“I didn’t dare do that.
I.
manipulated a meeting with him to try to find out what he knew.
And what I found out was. the baby had not died. A little girl found her, and her family adopted her. And now she lives in the house right across from the house where Rory Taylor is staying. She lives with her sister. She had some brain damage from that night. It’s mild, but she really does need someone to look out for her. Her sister seems to have done a good job of that. “
Eddie stood up and began to pace, something he always did when he was upset.
“This is unbelievable,” he said.
with one hundred percent certainty, that she is my daughter. It seems crazy that in the middle of a storm, the nurs would take her out to the beach, but”” —How many babies could have been born that night i;
Kill Devil Hills? ” Eddie asked.
“I know, I know. I just can’t make myself tell he] though, Eddie. What if I’m wrong?”
“Does she look like you?”
“Not really. She’s very blond, but then, so was her father.” She said the word other as though it tasted bad i:
her mouth. It did.
“But she’s tall and slender, just like me Just like Pamela was. And she has seizures, Eddie.”
“Marfan.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. And to make matters worse now she’s pregnant. She’s pregnant, she doesn’t know sh has Marfan’s syndrome, her child might have it, it might go undiagnosed, and” — “You’re being tortured by this.” Eddie sat next to be and took her hand again. He touched her cheek.
“Iwis you could have told me what was going on with you thi summer. I would have been there for you.
Grace. “
“I know,” Grace said.
