“Momma,” the little girl said, and Emma swept the dark-haired beauty into her arms. She quieted the sob, but it shook through her whole body.
“Oh, my baby,” she whispered, holding her tight and never wanting to let her go. She almost had an out-of-body experience, standing there on the side of the road, holding her daughter.
She couldn’t believe this was the life she had with Missy, and everything felt so heavy in her life. So, so heavy.
She saw no way out of it either. She didn’t own a home. Ginger paid her well enough, but she didn’t want to leave the ranch. She never wanted Rob to know about Missy, and she knew it was getting to be time for her to tell the girl why she lived with Fran and Matt and had her mother come visit every other weekend.
Emma finally released her daughter and stepped back. She wiped her eyes as she asked, “How was Florida, baby?”
“So much fun,” Missy said, looking at her with smiling eyes. They were the color of gray tea, and Emma saw herself in them. “Matt booked the sea ponies, Momma. Can you believe it?”
“Horses on the beach,” Emma said, glancing toward the front door. Fran and Matt stood there, watching. Fran leaned against the pillar on the porch, and Matt has his arm around his wife. “That sounds like a dream come true for you.”
“It was,” Missy said, putting her hand in Emma’s as they crossed the lawn. “They had a stool to help me get on, because they were big horses, Momma. They weren’t ponies.” She looked up at her. “And I still want to come to your ranch to ride.”
“Hmm,” Emma said, because she’d never told Missy more than she worked on a ranch. She wouldn’t tell her the name of it or anything. She looked up at Fran, who wore a beautiful smile on her face.
“Hello, Em,” she said, coming down the steps.
Emma embraced her and held her tight. “Hey, Fran.” She had not known Fran before she’d shown up on the woman’s front porch, a pink bundle of joy in her arms. They’d connected randomly through a community chat board about adoption. The thread had actually been about temporary stewardship, and Emma had been very interested in it.
Fran had said she would take a child even if she could never adopt it, and Emma had messaged her off the board. Things had gone from there, and Fran had been raising Missy for almost eleven years. Never once had she asked if she and Matt could adopt Missy. Never once had she or Matt ever done anything against the agreement they’d signed with Emma.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to Fran.
“Nothing to be sorry about. Come inside and have some sweet tea.” She stepped back, that smile still in place. Emma reached for Missy’s hand, and they went up the wide staircase together. Emma hugged Matt too, because he had to be the most patient man on Earth.
Her emotions quivered so close to the surface, but Emma managed to bite them back. They went inside, and with the front door closed and locked behind her, Emma finally started to relax.
Her tears had dried up about halfway back to the ranch, and as Emma pulled across the bridge, her face felt dry and cracked. It had been a great weekend with her daughter, and while they didn’t get out and do as much as they otherwise might have, she’d still enjoyed the basement movie afternoons, and the roller skating in the backyard.
Matt had put in a huge cement pad, and Missy had started to choreograph a routine to her favorite pop song—all while wearing roller skates. Emma smiled just thinking about it, and she had a video on her phone she’d have to erase before she went into the West Wing.
No one looked at her phone but her, but it was part of the pact Emma made with herself to keep Missy safe. She couldn’t be caught watching a video of a girl who looked a lot like her. There would be too many questions, and all of her secrets would come out.
She brought her car to a stop far enough back that someone who’d parked in the garages would be able to get out, and she reached for her phone. A fresh wave of emotion threatened to pull her under as she looked through her photos and videos. For the first few years of Missy’s life, she’d invested in cloud storage—password and authenticator protected—so she had lots of baby pictures.
But it had gotten expensive, and she’d found herself combing through the pictures and videos far too often, her heart cracking a little more with every photo she flipped through. She’d cancelled the subscription, but she could get to her photos and reactivate at any time.
“Maybe it’s time,” she whispered to herself. Then she could add the pictures and videos she’d taken that weekend.
She tapped on her gallery and the first picture that came up made her breath catch between her lungs and her throbbing heart. It was her and Missy, looking right into the camera, laughter in their eyes and sitting in the lines around their mouths.
She looked so much like Emma, with her dark hair, her smattering of freckles, the shape of her nose. Rob had manifested himself in the slope of her chin and the width of her forehead. They both had dark eyes, which had given Missy a stunning pair of eyes that lit up from within whenever she laughed.
Fran had taken this picture of the two of them on the couch only a few minutes before Emma had left. Missy said she needed a photo of someone important to her for a school project, and she wanted that to be of her mother.
I have to do an interview too, Missy had said. Can I call you this week?
Emma couldn’t
