Barbara Boswell - The Engagement Party

He had always been a serious child, intense and focused from an early age, and had grown into a responsible, hardworking student and athlete who’d made his proud parents even prouder. Matthew thought of the milestones—his graduations from high school, college and law school. His father, a camera buff, had been there to photograph the events, his mother smiling adoringly at her son. They had been there for the smaller everyday things, too—school programs, Little League games, helping with homework, a game of catch in the backyard. No son could have had a more loving, devoted set of parents. Matthew had been the center of their lives, and he knew it.

He had a shelf filled with albums of photos chronicling his life, from the day he’d been carried home from the hospital as a newborn to the family shots beside the gaily decorated Christmas tree snapped six months ago. It was the last Christmas he would ever spend with his mother and father. They had been killed in a car accident just two weeks later.

A spasm of grief, physical in its intensity, radiated through him. He remembered that devastating phone call from Albert Retton, his father’s best friend and fellow retired navy captain, the call that had shattered his life. And then the second shock, which had come only days after the funeral...

“You were adopted, Matthew,” Al Retton had told him. “Your parents knew you should have been told earlier but they couldn’t bring themselves to do it. They wanted you to believe you’d been born to them. I think they came to believe it themselves. But I was instructed to give you this letter if anything ever happened to them.”

The letter confirmed the adoption story and reassured Matthew of their great love for him. There were no references to the woman who had given birth to him or the man who’d fathered him, no mention of where he’d come from.

The news sent him reeling. He hadn’t had a clue. According to the letter, Galen and Eden had tried for years to have a child of their own before considering adoption. Matthew had been three days old when he’d left the hospital maternity ward with his adoptive parents, who had considered him their own from the moment they’d held him in their arms.

And from that moment on, adoption was never mentioned. Since the family had lived on naval bases all over the world and were without close relatives, the fiction had been easy to maintain.

Matthew placed the picture back in the drawer and reached inside his canvas bag. Inside were paperback editions of the books he’d written—page-turning thrillers with lawyers as the protagonists and the villains. He had used the pseudonym Galen Eden, a combination of his parents’ first names, and they had been thrilled with his success. He’d written the first book as a lark in his spare time, because he found the corporate law he was practicing both boring and unfulfilling. When the book turned out to be an unexpected blockbuster with the movie rights optioned, he decided to try again. After all, the first book might’ve been a fluke. It wasn’t. Two bestselling books later, he found himself retired from the corporation to write full-time.

But he hadn’t written a word since he’d learned that his whole life had been based on a lie. Six months later, he was still angry, bitter and disconnected, deeply grieving for his late parents yet hungry for the truth about his identity. A rather shady private investigator in Tampa, who demanded an outrageously expensive per diem, had promised him satisfaction, and finally, weeks later, had delivered his clandestinely obtained original birth certificate.

Carefully, Matthew removed it from the file at the bottom of the canvas bag.

He held it, not needing to read it because he’d studied it so long and so often that he knew it by heart. On the document, his name was listed as Baby Boy. No first name, no surname. Galen and Eden Granger were the ones who had named him Matthew John Granger, which appeared on a subsequent birth certificate, the familiar one he had always believed to be true.

Matthew’s eyes lingered on his birth mother’s name—Alexandra Wyndham, who had been just sixteen years old when her son was born. His father was listed as Jesse Polk, aged eighteen. There was no other information available. According to the detective, the maternity home for unwed mothers in central Florida where his mother had spent her pregnancy no longer existed.

But just last month, more information had turned up. The P.I. had tracked Alexandra Wyndham’s and Jesse Polk’s origins to a small, quiet and quaint city in South Carolina, situated very close to the ocean. Clover.

At first, Matthew had been dead set against coming to Clover. He’d tried to convince himself that the information he now possessed, the names of his birth parents, was enough. But the turmoil that had become his life continued unabated.

He couldn’t write; his concentration and his imagination seemed to have been suspended. He still lay awake night after night, troubled by grief and anger, grappling with the lifelong deception and all that was unknown to him. When he went to the library to research his latest book, he found himself researching South Carolina. Especially the coastal area. And finally, inevitably, Clover itself.

And so here he was, in the town where two lusty teenagers had taken no precautions and conceived him. He wondered if they were still here, although they certainly were not teenagers now. His mother would be forty-eight, his father, fifty. Still, they seemed startlingly young to him because his adoptive parents had been forty years old when he was born. And adopted.

Matthew stared at the battered copy of The First Families of South Carolina. His maternal relations were the upper-class Wyndhams. Their social position, wealth and prestige had come as a shock to him. Of his father, Jesse Polk, he knew nothing. The Polk family was not in the book, which meant they weren’t one of the first families of South Carolina.

But the Farleys were. Matthew turned back to the section on them. They rated only a few pages, as compared to the Wyndhams’ two full chapters. Both families had been given royal land grants in the latter half of the seventeenth century, but the Wyndhams, while keeping their land holdings, had soon moved up into the great wealth of the shipping business, with branches of the family based in Charleston. Through the centuries, the Farleys had remained socially prominent and well-to-do while the Wyndhams had achieved superstatus.

And he was part Wyndham. Part of their illustrious history. Matthew closed the book as confusion enveloped him like a heavy cloud. Matthew Wyndham. Matthew Polk. Matthew Granger. Who was he? It was a shattering blow to reach the age of thirty-two, only to find out that the life you’d been living and the identity you claimed as your own was a lie.

The sounds of music and laughter drifted up to his room, breaking the silence that enshrouded him. He was filled with a terrible loneliness. Since his parents’ death, he had distanced himself from everybody—his friends, his agent, his editor at the publishing house. His love life had been nonexistent. He had no energy or desire to pursue any of the women who wanted him.

Even before the tragedy, he had always been in control, remaining slightly aloof with his lovers because he wasn’t looking for emotional intimacy with all its accompanying entanglements. He’d enjoyed women and sex but steered clear of involvement. That dreaded phrase “serious relationship,” when uttered by a dewy-eyed woman, made him want to run in the opposite direction. He’d had his writing, his parents’ adoration, his friends and his woman of the moment. Who needed anything more?

Now his life seemed singularly empty, without focus, without love.