The vise around his throat tightened another notch. “Never married.” He pushed himself off the chair and swung it back around to the puzzle table, only to notice that the elderly couple had gone. So had the sullen teenager and her parents.
The television was silent. The flat screen black.
He looked back at Laurel. “Have you decided what you want to do when you leave here?”
“You mean when they kick me out because they can’t afford to keep me any longer than they already have?”
“They’re not kicking you out.”
“How do you know?”
“Dr. Granger told me she’s made arrangements.” It was at least a partial truth.
She didn’t look any less troubled. “I can’t stay here forever, though. I assume I have a life I should be getting back to.” She pushed the pencil behind her ear, reminding him sharply of days gone by that ought to have dimmed in his memory, and tugged at the bottom of her sleeve again. “Only nobody from that life’s come looking for me.”
His molars clenched again. He thought of the man who, despite everything, was keeping vigil beside Linus in a Houston hospital. “Not for lack of trying.”
She shot him a quick look. “What do you mean?”
“Your fiancé.” His voice was brusque. He couldn’t help it. “Eric Johnson. He looked for you.”
Her brows pulled together. “I’m engaged? How do you know that? And if he looked for me, why isn’t he here now?”
He looked at the ceiling, head splitting, back aching, and wished his heart were empty. “Oh, sweetheart,” he sighed. “That is a long, convoluted story.” He took a deep breath and looked down at her. The window beside her was darkened. The sun had set. “We can talk about it tomorrow.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re coming back?”
When it came to Laurel Hudson, it seemed he’d never change. “Yeah.” His voice was gruff. “I’m coming back.”
Chapter Two
“Well?” Kane’s voice was demanding. “You saw her?”
Adam pressed the speaker button on his cell phone and tossed it down on the bed in his motel room while he practically ripped off the cap of the pain relievers he’d bought at the convenience store across the street from Fresh Pine.
“I saw her.” He downed two of the pills dry and yanked his shirttails out of his jeans as he crossed the room to the window. It overlooked a parking lot full of work trucks and middle-class cars. The economy rental he’d gotten from the airport was indistinguishable among them.
He pulled the beige curtains closed and punched the Colder button on the air-conditioning unit beneath the window.
“And?”
She didn’t have any miraculous recovery at the sight of me. He looked back at the phone as if he were looking at his brother. “And nothing,” he said aloud.
“Bull.”
He pressed the heels of his palms against his closed eyes and gingerly lowered himself onto the bed beside the phone until he lay flat. The bag of food he’d picked up at the deli next to the motel was sitting by the bolted-down television where he’d left it. His stomach felt hollow, but the effort to get up and retrieve the food didn’t seem worth it.
“She has amnesia,” he said to the phone and the room at large. “She doesn’t actually remember me. My face was just familiar to her for some reason.”
“A five-month-old reason,” Kane said flatly. “Whether or not her conscious self knows why, something deeper knows she made a baby with you last year. Maybe it’s karma for her claiming that baby was someone else’s.”
Adam winced. Kane spoke about the baby with more ease than Adam could. “More like I’m familiar from college days,” he corrected flatly. He didn’t want to believe Laurel had deliberately lied about the baby’s father, but at the moment, it was more than a little difficult.
“She remembers me from college. It’s long-term memory.” That was what Dr. Granger believed, at any rate. “What happened last year is too new.” As were her actions five months ago, when she’d left her—their—newborn son.
Call it what it was. Abandoned.
He wished he could shut the voice in his head up. Even Eric had told him not to think of it in those terms. Yes, Laurel had left her son. But she’d left him in a safe environment, and at a pediatric center, no less, and it was something that they all needed to remember.
His lips twisted. It didn’t make anything better.
It was just more proof that Eric was the better man. Legally, he’d been declared the baby’s father. He could have kept the truth to himself. But he hadn’t. Not once he’d learned that Adam was in the picture.
Kane was on a roll, too. “Except she doesn’t recall her parents?” His voice was hard. Sarcastic. “Or her own name? Seems to me those are pretty long-term memories, too.”
Adam changed the subject. “Any word about the birth certificate?” Just because Eric had figured out Adam was the baby’s father, it didn’t mean the Great State of Texas had caught up with that fact. There were rules about who could request official birth records—much less get one man’s name off and another on—and for now, Adam didn’t meet the requirements.
Which meant involving the official people who could.
“Not yet,” Kane said. “Eric had a letter from the missing mama saying he was Linus’s father and a crappy DNA test that confirmed it well enough for a judge to give him custody back in February. Then he got that second DNA test done after the donor drive a few months ago that conclusively said otherwise. And now all those tests they ran on you before the transplant? It was a short step from HLA markers and whatever to a DNA test. Hell, you’ve got DNA tests to spare at this point. It’s no wonder the social worker Eric had back in February is saying that it’ll take a few days
