Darlene Gardner - The Secret Sin

As soon as he talked in private to whomever had brought in Lindsey, it would be the little girl’s turn.

The nurse who’d been assisting him came back, walking down the hall with another woman trailing her. Ryan blinked once, then twice, but his eyes weren’t wrong.

It didn’t matter that the nurse partially obscured his view and a baseball-style cap covered the second woman’s hair. He would have recognized her from a hundred feet away, which was about as close as he’d come to her since they were teenagers.

“Dr. Whitmore, this is the woman who brought in Lindsey,” the nurse said when they reached him. “Annie—?”

“Sublinski,” he finished, keeping his eyes trained on Annie, who had yet to meet his gaze. “We went to high school together.”

“Then you don’t need me,” the nurse said cheerfully. She excused herself as though the chance meeting was nothing out of the ordinary.

She couldn’t know he and Annie Sublinski had last spoken more than thirteen years ago on the telephone about giving up the baby she was carrying.

The nurse couldn’t possibly be aware of all the things Ryan had never said to Annie, or the guilt that never quite went away no matter how much he tried to live in the moment.

He shook off the memories and focused on the present.

“This is a surprise,” he said.

She raised her eyes. The color was an unremarkable mixture of brown and green. He was at a loss as to why he’d always found them so fascinating.

She’d been appealing as a teen but was even more so now that she was nearly thirty. Her bare arms and legs were toned and tanned, and she had a natural, clear-skinned look that could put a cosmetic company out of business—if not for her port-wine stain. He wondered why she’d never had it removed.

“For me, too.” Her eyes were guarded, as though she’d noticed him assessing her birthmark. He hoped she hadn’t. “A surprise, I mean. I didn’t know you were filling in for Dr. Goldstein.”

She clearly wouldn’t have brought Lindsey to the pediatrician’s office if she had. A few years back, while he was visiting family over Christmas, he’d spotted Annie coming out of Abe’s General Store. The downtown had been decorated with wreaths and festive lights, the perfect setting for an apology. Annie had spotted him coming and promptly crossed the street, rushing through the snowflakes drifting from the sky before disappearing into her pickup.

“About Lindsey.” She held herself stiffly, like a cornered animal ready to take flight. “Do you know what’s wrong with her?”

Now obviously was not the time to bring up the past.

“We can talk in there.” He nodded toward his colleague’s office. She hesitated, then complied, not looking at him as she passed. He followed her into the room, closing the door with a soft thud.

She winced at the noise, edged backward and crossed her arms over her chest. Her weight shifted from foot to foot.

Pretending her body language didn’t bother him, he hoisted himself up on the edge of the desk that dominated the room. “There’s nothing wrong with Lindsey a glass of orange juice and a sandwich won’t cure.”

“Excuse me?”

He tapped the girl’s file against his palm. “Her blood sugar was low. The last time she ate was this morning, and all she had was yogurt.”

“That’s all that was wrong with her?”

“Like a lot of teenage girls, she has some skewed ideas about how much she should weigh,” he said. “We gave her some juice and a granola bar one of the nurses had left over from lunch, but she could use a good meal.”

“I should have asked if she’d eaten.” Annie seemed to be talking to herself as much as him. “At the train station, I should have asked her.”

“The train station?” he repeated.

She nodded. “In Paoli. I picked her up an hour or so ago.”

“Who is she?”

Her eyes shifted, which they’d been doing a lot. “A friend of the family.”

That didn’t compute. Whoever had filled out the forms, and he had to assume that was Annie, hadn’t even known the names of Lindsey’s parents.

“I don’t know much about her,” she answered as though she’d read his mind. “I didn’t even know she was coming. She’s here to visit my father. Her grandfather’s a friend of his.”

That didn’t make sense, either. “Didn’t I hear that your father is in Poland?”

“Lindsey didn’t know that.”

“Shouldn’t her parents have known?”

Annie looked away again, heightening his sense that she was hiding something. “I don’t think they know she’s here.”

“Have you called them?”

She seemed to be clenching her teeth. “Kind of tough to do without a phone number.”

So that’s what Annie was concealing. Now that she’d admitted she didn’t have a home phone number for Lindsey, it was easy to piece together what had happened today.

Lindsey had gotten on a train without telling her parents she was leaving, which just might qualify as running away from home. He thought about the little girl who’d waved at him from the room down the hall. She was going to have to wait a little longer for the doctor to arrive.

“Let’s go see Lindsey.” He hopped down from the desk, yanked open the door, then let Annie precede him. There wasn’t much space between him and the door, but she managed to squeeze through without touching him. He caught a whiff of her clean, outdoorsy scent, and he was transported back years, to the single night they’d spent together.

“Second door on the right,” he told her, his mind thick with memories. How could that night, which had been so special, have had such shattering repercussions?

She hung back, wordlessly indicating he should enter the room ahead of her. He wasn’t as careful to avoid contact as she had been, inadvertently brushing her arm as he passed. She jerked sideways as though pricked by a porcupine.

Damn. He’d found it charming that she’d been flustered around him when they were in high school, but this was a new reaction altogether. She was nervous—and not in a good way.

The hell of it was that he couldn’t talk to her about it. Not now. As a doctor, his primary responsibility was to his patient. He had a more pressing matter to deal with than his regrets over the past.

His priorities back in order, he strode through the door to find that Lindsey had moved from the exam table to a chair in the corner of the room. Her color was better, but he read apprehension on her face when she saw Annie following him. What was that about? he wondered.

He smiled at her, an easy task. Lindsey was trying her hardest to act grown-up, but underneath her brave front was a rather charming child. “How’s that orange juice going down?”

“I’d rather have a Diet Coke.” Her quick comeback and smile reminded him of somebody he couldn’t quite place.

“Juice is a better choice,” Annie said.

Lindsey’s smile faded, her hand tightening on the half-full glass. “I like Diet Coke.”

“Annie has a point, Lindsey,” Ryan interjected. “You need nutrients to build up your blood sugar, and diet soda won’t cut it.”

He didn’t give Lindsey an opening to respond, pulling a piece of paper from her file and extending it to her. “I need some information for our records before I can release you.”

With obvious reluctance, she took the form and the pen he handed her along with it.

“I realize you don’t know your insurance information,” he added, “but it would help if you filled out what you can.”

Lindsey nodded before turning her attention to the form, her brow knitting in concentration as she wrote. Annie stood like a statue just inside the door, keeping as far away from him as possible.