Anna Adams - The Prodigal Cousin

As if Patrick sensed the dangerous secret she was about to disclose, he leaned back, adding several inches of distance between them. The morning grew cooler. Desperate to keep her old life even as she forced her way into a new one, Eliza peered around at the walls. She cataloged the familiar menus and feed store advertisements, calendars that featured Jesus praying in the garden and others with scantily clad women sprawled on tractors.

This town had become her home. She’d have to leave if Patrick couldn’t accept her and Sam. She took a deep breath. How could she doubt her husband? Gary Masters, Sam’s birth father, had abandoned her to deal with consequences alone, but Patrick had always stood at her side.

“I did something I’m not proud of. Before I met you, when I was sixteen, I gave birth to a child.” That wasn’t what she meant. She wasn’t ashamed of Sam—though she had been ashamed, the smart young girl who’d gotten in trouble with a boy who’d almost immediately left her.

Patrick’s mouth opened on a sigh that might have been a groan. Eliza couldn’t stop.

“A son,” she said, “whom I gave up for adoption. My parents refused to help me. I went to a home for unwed mothers, but it wasn’t like what your mother and Sophie do for the girls at the Mom’s Place. I can’t tell you how awful—”

“What are you saying?”

“You have to listen to me.” He’d heard, but a blank expression betrayed his shock. She tried again. “I have a son. I gave him up—”

“I can’t believe what you’re saying.”

“You have to.”

He wiped sweat off his upper lip. “That’s why you always slip Mom money.”

“You knew?” Her donations were supposed to have been her secret.

“Molly noticed. She thinks you do it because she was one of those girls. She gives her grandmother what she can as well.”

Eliza covered her face. “What will Molly think of me? What will this do to her? Me, falling off my pedestal.”

Patrick eyed her with the neutral expression he offered defendants in unwieldy court cases. “I was going to ask if you’d told her.”

“Not before I told you.” How could he think that?

“You’re so close I thought you might have…. What made you speak up after all this time? Certainly not an obligation to come clean.”

His unexpected taunt nearly strangled her. She left it hanging, poisonous in the air between them until she managed to gasp a short breath. “I wanted to tell you many times, but I’ve been afraid.”

“After lying to me all these years, you should fear the truth.” He sipped his coffee as they stopped being a couple and turned into two separate people.

“Sam is my son.” Best to tear the Band-Aid off in one quick motion. Screaming inside, she allowed herself no outward reaction to her husband’s hand falling limply from the table or to his eyes dulling in shock. “Nina and Tamsin are my granddaughters. Sam brought them because he was afraid they’d have no one else if something happened to him. I want to know them, Patrick.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Sam?”

“Sam is my son.”

“Sam at the Dogwood, with the two little girls?”

“Patrick, are you all right?” Had she caused him to have a stroke or something?

“I’m lost. You had a baby, and the baby grew up to be Sam?”

“I need him. He thinks he wants something from me, but I’m getting a second chance I can’t turn down.”

“Even if it costs you Molly and me?”

“Patrick, Tamsin knows—and she needs us. Sam and his girls could have all of us.”

“I’m sorry about Tamsin, but I don’t see us as one big happy family.” As he straightened, he looked like a stranger. Patrick had never been a man who could withhold love for the sake of revenge, but his anger felt like hatred.

Her world splintered. She closed her eyes for the briefest moment, but she had no time for fear. She’d been afraid and given up Sam. Look where that had brought them.

“I can’t stand to lose you, but I can’t turn my back on my son again,” she stated. “Think of Tamsin. She troubled you, too. She needs a family’s love.”

“My family’s? How can I accept them? How can I even accept that you’ve hidden Sam’s existence?”

“Try to understand. I’ve missed Sam every day of his life, but I could never tell anyone.” Her eyes filled with tears. “You admired me because I came up here to the middle of nowhere to teach. You thought I was someone better than I’ve ever felt. How could I tell you?”

Her fear brought life back to Patrick’s eyes, but not forgiveness.

“I won’t speak for Molly.” Standing abruptly, he threw money on the table. “But I can’t fall in with this little change you’re making in our lives. You’re not the woman I married.”

“Where are you going?”

“You have no right to ask.” His cold gaze pronounced her guilty. “You never trusted me.”

Patrick rushed to the door of the café, stumbling against a table edge, bumping a rack of property rental magazines. Her heart broke. She pressed both hands to her chest as if she could catch the pieces.

Cast off again.

It hadn’t happened in such a long time, she didn’t know what to do. Cry or run after Patrick? Go to her son?

She couldn’t do either. She had to talk to Molly. The world spun crazily. How could she face disillusionment in her daughter’s eyes?

THE BALLOONS LAY in pieces on the floor. Molly swept them up, spreading a cloud of dust that smelled of wet children and dirty shoes and musty books.

A big splash of green balloon reminded her of Nina. The children in her class had written the letters they knew on their balloons. Earlier that morning Nina had written her name, and Sam’s and Tamsin’s with only a little help. She’d added Molly’s name, remembering it well enough to write it again after Molly had spelled it for her only once.

Moments like that reminded Molly why she loved to teach. Children who were eager to learn made the mind-dulling business sessions and the fight for funding, even in such a small school, worthwhile.

Her thoughts returned to Sam’s girls. Nina’s curiosity charmed the daylights out of her, but Tamsin’s Goth clothing and makeup alarmed her. In Nina’s big sister, Molly sensed the quiet desperation that had once been her constant companion.

Molly often wondered if her colleagues worried about their students’ home lives, but she never asked. Asking would expose one of those traits she wasn’t sure every woman shared. Where “normal” people assumed their friends, their families, even the children they taught lived in safety, Molly prepared herself for…not the worst, but not the best, either.

Eliza and Patrick had taken her into foster care after Eliza discovered that the dirty-haired, unkempt girl who’d once inhabited a corner of her classroom was “living” in an empty house on the edge of town. Molly had been alone for seven months by the time Eliza realized her so-called parents had abandoned her to live their separate lives in Knoxville.

After several inconvenient visits from Child Protective Services, Bonnie, Molly’s birth mother, and Mitch, her father, had been more than willing to give up their daughter. Eliza had made Molly feel special when the girl had wanted to hide in humiliation.

Molly had assumed no one could love her. Patrick and Eliza Calvert’s home had been paradise—a most unreliable situation so far in Molly’s short life. She’d tested her foster parents with behavior that horrified her in retrospect. But they’d kept loving her.

After the miscarriage, Patrick and Eliza had adopted her. In return for their kindness—and as penance for her own unforgivable mistakes— Molly had finally learned to consider every possible consequence before she made a move.