Emilie Richards - Somewhere Between Luck and Trust

“What brought you here?”

Their beer arrived before he could answer, along with a promise that the garlic knots would be out soon. Lucas held up his mug in toast, and she tapped hers against it.

“I’m a journalist,” he said. “In Atlanta, although these days I’m just a guest columnist. Newspapers are hanging on by their fingernails.”

“So your job was...compressed?”

He smiled at her word choice. “It was compressed, but that was my choice. I’m also a novelist. I write a mystery series about an Atlanta cop. The books have done surprisingly well, and I decided that’s what I wanted to concentrate on.”

She was embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I don’t read mysteries, so your name’s not familiar.”

“What do you read?”

“Nonfiction mostly. Biography, memoir, psychology.”

“And education, I bet.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“Don’t worry. Police procedurals aren’t everybody’s cup of tea. But I started out in the Metro section and spent so much time in police stations trying to get the real scoop that finally my main character, a detective named Zenzo Brown, just came to life and started making demands.”

“That must be pretty amazing. Like having an imaginary friend. My daughter had one of those for years, until third grade. Then Marigold just up and left. I think I missed her more than Samantha did.”

“So you have kids?”

“Just one, and she’s thirty. But I have a fabulous granddaughter.”

“And no husband.”

Lucas had changed into jeans and a sage-green sweatshirt over the shirt he had worn earlier, and if anything, he looked even more attractive. They had to lean forward to be heard, and their noses almost touched. She tried to remember the last time she’d sat this close to a man who wasn’t on the BCAS faculty.

She tried to remember the last time she had wanted to.

“I had one,” she said. “He died a long time ago. In Beirut, when the marine barracks were bombed. I haven’t wanted another.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too. He was a good man, and he was cheated out of watching his daughter grow up.”

“I was married, too. She didn’t want kids, but she didn’t tell me until we were a couple of years into it. I come from this strange Scots-Italian family, and all my siblings have at least three. I thought I’d have the same. The marriage dissolved somewhere between ‘I never want to have children’ and ‘I’ve met somebody who can give me a better life.’” He gave a wry smile. “I was easily fooled back then, but three years of marriage and a decade and a half in the newspaper biz took care of that.”

She supposed the intimacy that had developed so quickly between them wasn’t too surprising. It was some odd kind of shorthand, like a more mature form of speed dating. Get past the preliminaries quickly, and move on...to what?

“Why are we telling each other all this?” she asked, since the question intrigued her and all her filters seemed to have disappeared. “We’re supposed to be talking about Dawson.”

“We’ll get to him.”

The garlic knots arrived with marinara dipping sauce. They conferred for a moment and, before their server disappeared again, ordered a large Carolina Dreamin’ pizza to share.

“I need to be honest with you. I actually know more about you than I’ve let on,” Lucas said. “Before I approached you about Dawson, I wanted to know who I was dealing with. So I looked you up online. I can’t seem to help myself. It’s my journalist genes.”

She set down her mug, not all that surprised, but definitely disappointed. “Please tell me my life has nothing to do with a story you’re planning.”

He looked sympathetic. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

She decided he was being honest and hoped her instincts were good.

“The Sweatshirt Baby,” he said.

Georgia thought of the article she’d pulled out of the envelope a little more than an hour ago. “It’s surprising how that still comes back to haunt me.”

“I imagine you got used to it somewhere along the way.”

“No, there was actually a long period of time when nobody pieced together the sad story of my birth with the one about a young widow working on her doctorate in education.”

“Then you were made the headmistress of the most exclusive private school in the Asheville area, and somebody dug a little and made the connection.”

“And it came up again when I got this new position.”

His gaze was warm and locked with hers. “I didn’t mean to invade your privacy.”

“I have no privacy. Not since the morning a woman gave birth unexpectedly and left a premature baby in a hospital sink wrapped in a University of Georgia sweatshirt. There was very little chance I’d be left alone after that.”

He didn’t offer sympathy, for which she was grateful. “It was a lot more than I expected to find. All I wanted was some hint on how to approach you. Your educational philosophy, maybe.”

That struck her as funny, and she gave a low laugh, which broke the tension. “I’m sorry my history is so overwhelming.”

“I’m sorry it is, too,” he said with feeling. “But you’re the model for every kid who’s facing his own problems and doesn’t believe he’ll ever be able to make a success out of his life.”

“I gather the ‘he’ is meant to be Dawson?”

“Don’t you have a whole school full of Dawsons?”

“Well, not all of them are quite so recalcitrant.”

He sat back, as if the hard part was over. She appreciated that he’d been honest with her, and thought how unusual that was. He could so easily have pretended not to know anything.

“The story’s pretty old,” she said. “Exactly what did you ferret out?”

“What you just said. That you were left in a sink in a sweatshirt and nearly died of exposure before somebody heard you crying and found you.”

“Forever after to be known as the Sweatshirt Baby. That’s obviously where the name Georgia comes from, too. The shirt. You got that, right?”

He smiled as if he was relieved she wasn’t angry. “I did. Someone had a sense of humor.”

“I think they just called me Georgia at first as a kind of shorthand, and the name stuck. Later somebody put it on my birth certificate. It was the only legacy my mother bequeathed me. Other than leaving me in the sink instead of on the floor of a toilet stall, and wrapping me tightly in the sweatshirt, which probably saved my life.”

“They never found her?”

“Never did. It was a cause célèbre for a long time. Newspapers, magazines, cops, psychics. Everybody looked, but nobody was successful.”

She thought about the articles on her desk and the charm bracelet. “Nobody cares anymore,” she said, without the level of certainty she would have managed before that discovery. “Now when they trot out the story, it’s to show what a person can survive if she has the fortitude.”

“What did you survive?”

“Well, first I survived being more than two months premature and abandoned. Then I survived surgery to repair a faulty valve in my heart. By then most of the offers of adoption had waned, and the one that didn’t was from a couple with no experience raising children, much less a child who’d spent the first year and a half of her life connected to monitors and machines. They returned me to the state when I turned five.”

“That’s hard to fathom.”

Georgia couldn’t imagine it, either, but her fuzzy memories of those years weren’t happy, and now she thought she’d been lucky her adoptive parents had given up trying to raise her.

“After that I went to foster care and treatment programs because nobody had done me any favors emotionally. At eleven the state placed me on a farm with an experienced foster mom with four special-needs kids. Arabella was seventy-two, if you can believe that, and still full of energy. She sat me down and told me to make a list of all the things I planned to do to make her life miserable, so she could tell me why none of them would work. Then she said the only way I’d leave that placement was if she left first in a coffin, and she wanted me to know she would be watching her back.”