Anna Adams - The Secret Father

And she wondered why he’d agreed to let her interview him if he’d been so desperate to get away from her six years ago? Maybe he’d forgotten her.

Fine. He only had to remember enough to believe he might be Evan’s father.

As the plane drifted on descent, she opened Zach’s dossier. After his accident, he’d spent three months in a hospital outside San Diego. Four months after that, he’d married one of his nurses. Within eight months of their marriage, their daughter, Lily, had been born.

Which explained his silence. Had he been sleeping with Helene and her at the same time? Even six years later she felt like an idiot for trusting him.

Zach had been her first love. Tall and tough, unstoppable in his pursuit, he’d made her think she was all that mattered to him in the whole world. Combine that with his status as her father’s last choice, and she’d hardly known how to resist.

Looking back through newly opened eyes, she no longer believed in his passion or her own. She’d taken a stupid risk the night she’d forgotten her birth control. And after his supposed death, she’d made up a loving father for her son. The part where Zach had abandoned her never came into her stories.

Finally she’d tried not to remember Zach at all. But then a day would start when Evan woke with sleepy, is-it-morning eyes that reminded her of his father, or he startled her with the long capable fingers that looked too uncomfortably much like Zach’s.

She closed the folder and peered through the small window at the deep green forest flowing beneath the airplane. Dark and verdant, as mysterious as Zach’s true intentions. What had he wanted with her? Not that she’d expected forever, but a phone call to tell her she was no longer in the picture would have been nice.

Looking at mountains that seemed to have no border with flat land, she felt like an intruder. She’d once prayed Zach would ask her to meet his family. Now, possibly in front of them, she had to find out who he really was so she could decide whether to tell Evan he hadn’t died.

Olivia slipped the folder back into her soft briefcase and then fished out another clean, almost untouched file Brian had put together for her. She hadn’t told Evan or Brian the truth, so she had to go home with some kind of story.

The bank photo lay on top. Beneath were clippings from all the other stories Brian had gathered on the attempted robbery.

After the plane landed, Olivia collected her bags and packed them into her rental car. As soon as she left the airport, the road began to rise. The interstate, narrowing into two lanes, had been cut into red clay and granite hills spiked with evergreens, smoothed by icy-looking streams.

Like a bad omen, clouds covered the sun, dulling the red and gold leaves of the hardwoods. Rest stops and traffic came few and far between, and her ears began to pop at the higher elevation.

She fumbled in her purse and briefcase for gum, but Evan must have found her stash. Her boy was a fiend for gum. She gave up and yawned to clear the pressure.

As she passed the first mileage sign for Bardill’s Ridge, she breathed a sigh of relief. She ought to be able to find Sheriff Calvert’s office just in time for her appointment.

At her turnoff, she followed the long ramp away from the interstate. No sign of life stirred within the trees. Such a heavy dose of nature could make a city woman a little anxious.

At the end of the ramp a sign pointing to the left offered her the chance to turn back. To the right Bardill’s Ridge waited. Olivia opened her window and breathed in pine-laden air.

She could go home, continue the life she’d made with Evan and tell Brian the story on Zach hadn’t panned out. Her heart pounded in jackhammer fashion.

A right turn would change her life, but it might also bring her son a father who could love him. What choice did she have?

She turned right and the road inclined again. Soon a white church spire peeked out of the leaves. Just beyond the spire a redbrick cupola topped a black-shingled roof. Extremely Norman Rockwell. Olivia’s heart rate returned to normal. She could handle a Norman Rockwell town.

In front of her, a tractor turned off a dirt road onto the shoulder. The driver lifted his ball cap as she slowed to pass him.

That never happened in Chicago.

On the outskirts of Bardill’s Ridge, she passed a large blue clapboard feed store. The sign that clung to the roof of a wide veranda-cum-loading dock shouted Henderson’s in capital letters. Sticks of straw blew into the road from the bales on the porch. The men hoisting feed onto their trucks and into the backs of their SUVs looked up from their chores as she slowed to the speed limit.

Zach had been right when he’d warned the bank robber that people here noticed strangers. She passed a library, two small churches and too many curious faces.

Farther down the street, a sign painted with cartoon bears and rabbits and a bouncing typeface proclaimed the building behind it the ABC Daycare. Olivia missed Evan with a keen ache as the boys and girls spilled across the play yard.

Closer to the center of town, there were more office buildings. As she passed them the women and men who strode the surprisingly busy sidewalks watched her. No matter what he decided to do about Evan, Zach would have to explain about her after she left town.

Olivia glanced at her watch. Five past two.

At the next stop sign she glanced right and found the big white church. She turned, but had to stop again on the edge of a small square encircled by wrought iron. On one side stood the church. Beside her, a curlicued, Victorian theater promised the latest releases. Opposite, a high school looked buttoned up and busy, with papers on the windows and a teacher holding class outside as his students inspected a maple’s bright shedding leaves. The redbrick building across the square was the courthouse, Bardill’s county seat, according to a tall, black sign posted out front.

Olivia glanced at her briefcase, containing both folders and a photo vital to her plan. Zach had told Brian she’d find him in his office in the jail at the back of the courthouse.

She parked and grabbed her things. Fighting wind, she slipped into the square, via an iron gate. Her heels slid on the cobblestone path that crisscrossed the grass. At the other side of the park she exited through another gate and crossed the wide street. Breathing hard, she climbed the courthouse steps and scoured the map at the front door.

The jail was a left off the long, tall lower hall. Just beyond, a glass door led to a closer parking lot. Olivia swore and tried to tame her wild hair as her shoes clicked loudly on the marble.

Reaching Zach’s office door exactly on time, she twitched her skirt into place, tugged at her sweater’s neckline and then watched her right hand tremble on the doorknob.

If she’d known she was pregnant before Zach left, she would have told him. She was simply doing what she would have done then. If Zach didn’t want Evan, she could still say she’d done her best for her son.

She opened the door, anticipating a dispatcher. Instead, Zach looked up from paperwork spread on a wide, scarred oak desk.

His dark blue uniform emphasized lean muscles and the dark blond hair that nearly touched his collar. From ten feet away, a bleak shadow in his green eyes startled her. He was the same man, but he looked at the world from a different point of view. Something had drawn extra lines on his face and added more than six years of weariness to his eyes.

Olivia clung to the doorknob, rocking back on her high heels.

Zach stood and came around his desk. His gaze swept her, cataloging her head to toe. Not the way he had when they’d been lovers, but the way a stranger took stock of someone he might not entirely trust.