She should have come to him. She should have trusted him more. There was a big difference between her and his biological father: he’d loved her.
But she hadn’t known that, had she?
He pushed the errant thought away and steeled himself against that vulnerable,I’m so alonething she was giving off.
She hadn’t been alone.
But whether she should have told him no longer mattered. She hadn’t, and that was the reality they would both have to deal with.
A reality that apparently included a baby. “When did you find out you were pregnant?”
It was the wrong question to ask for someone who was trying to resist the silenthelp meexpression on her face. Her composure crumbled and tears sprang to her eyes. Big brown eyes that were even softer and more expressive than the green contacts he’d spent months looking into.
If the eyes were the window to the soul then the barrier had been removed.
“It was right after Mick told me what happened. I’d been nauseous off and on for a couple days, but that was when I started getting sick. Really sick. I thought it was because of everything that was going on and the news Mick had told me about your death, but my best friend from childhood was visiting for the weekend before taking a new job in New York, and she suspected something else. I’d told Jennifer about you.”
“But you never told me about her.”
Natalie looked down, clearly ashamed. He saw her shoulders tremble a little before she took a deep breath and looked back up at him.
How the fuck could someone he knew was strong appear so fragile? The past few months had obviously broken her down. Or maybe it was the relief of not having to lie anymore. The urge to reach for her was so natural that he had to physically squeeze his muscles tight not to do so.
“I didn’t want you to learn anything about me, Scott. I thought it would protect me.”
“From what? Me finding out about your being adopted or that you had family and friends you cared about?”
“I thought that if I didn’t let you in I would be able to keep you at a safe distance. But it didn’t work.”
His muscles tightened even more. He reached for the now label-less beer and took a long drink, not caring if it was stale. Beer was beer. But Bud Light wasn’t going to take the edge off the demons wrestling in him right now. He’d need something far stronger for that. A bottle of whiskey would be a good start.
“So your friend Jennifer figured it out,” he said, prompting her to continue and get back to the story.
She nodded, eyes still big and dominating her paleface. “I didn’t take the possibility well. I’d just found out you’d died and I was panicked at the idea of a baby. I told her I couldn’t be, but I got it in my head to go to the drugstore to get a test. I didn’t make it to the door before I was sick again. Jennifer told me to lie down and she’d go get me something and a test. She didn’t have a car so she took mine.” It was getting more and more difficult for her to talk as the emotion in her voice crept up higher and higher. She tried to take a deep breath, but it came out unevenly. “Jennifer called a little while later and said she thought someone was following her.” Natalie looked up at him pleadingly, tears rolling down her cheeks. “She was so scared, Scott. It was horrible. I could hear the terror in her voice. I knew it was Mick. I tried to warn her, but she screamed, there was a loud crashing sound, and then the line went dead.”
She let out a sob and buried her face in her hands as the tears really started to flow. His hand was halfway to her shoulder before he forcefully pulled it back.
What the hell was the matter with him? Damn it, he didn’t want to feel sorry for her or see her side of anything. He didn’t want any gray messing up his black-and-white.
He sat there, his insides twisting in torturous knots, as she cried. Good thing for him it didn’t last long. He didn’t know how much longer he could sit there playing stony.
She sniffled and used a napkin from the wooden holder on the table to wipe her eyes and nose. After a moment, she regained her composure and continued. “I heard the sirens a minute or two later and suspected what happened. I didn’t know what to do. I posted anonymously on our social media neighborhood group and a bunch of people in the area posted within a few minutes that a car had exploded under the freeway overpass, and the driver had been killed.” Who needed police blotters anymore? She shuddered as if the news were still fresh.“I knew I had to get out of there. Either Mick would realize he’d killed the wrong person and come after me, or the police would be showing up with questions that I didn’t want to answer. I took my purse, Jennifer’s things, and a few things I couldn’t bear to leave behind and ran. I lived in fear that the police would realize what had happened, especially since it took me a couple days to remember to destroy the SIM card in my phone, but they never did. Jennifer had my car and my keys, and her purse must have burned up in the fire. Not even my mother realized,” she said in a whisper.
“She identified the body?”
Natalie nodded. “Jennifer and I looked a lot alike, and I’m sure there was... uh, trauma.” The body would have been badly burned. “I watched my mom go into the coroner’s building, but I couldn’t watch her come back out. I wanted to tell her so badly, but I knew it was safer for my family if they thought I was dead, too.”
“You were there?”
“I had to be. I couldn’t let her go through that alone.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. She obviously loved her mother a lot to risk returning to DC. “The police didn’t do an investigation?”
She shook her head. “I assume there wasn’t a reason to. Everything was cut-and-dry.”
Not so cut-and-dry because here she was. But it wasn’t all that surprising. City police stations didn’t have CSI budgets, and with an identification they wouldn’t go to the trouble of obtaining dental records.
Scott watched the emotions play across her face and knew what she was thinking. He’d steeled himself long enough, damn it. He might want to be made out of stone, but he wasn’t. “It wasn’t your fault, Natalie.”
