Dallas was buckled in the passenger seat of Noah’s four-by-four before he made it to the vehicle and her urgency didn’t lessen once they were on the move.
She checked the speedometer and grimaced. “Can’t you go faster?”
“I could, but I’m already ten over the limit.”
The need to do something, anything, gnawed at her stomach. “I’m calling Mom.” She unclipped her cell from the waistband of her jeans.
“Are you sure you want to do that?”
She jerked her head toward him. “Why the hell not?”
“You don’t think this is something you should discuss with her one on one?”
“It’s something she should have told me years ago. Why should I cut her any slack?” But in her anger, she recognized that Noah was right. She stabbed her fingers through her hair. “I can’t believe that Trojan horse is my biological mother. God.” She wanted to throw things. She wanted to hit someone. “How did Mom ever think the truth wouldn’t come out?” It always did. Sooner or later. “I’m forty-five years old, and I just found out my mother is not my mother, and my sister, who I loved and cherished all of my life and whose death I still mourn, is not my sister, and my real mother is a general in the Proper Pedigree Army, and I have a sister who is married to a friend of my husband, and I have two nieces who I never met or knew about my entire life. God.” She threw her cell against the dash and buried her face between her hands.
Beside her Noah remained silent. “Do you have something to say?” She watched him bite his cheek and knew something worried him. “Out with it.”
“We’re all related somehow. Not related as in blood related, or even by law related, but we’re all related. Yo ho.” He tilted his chin.
Dallas couldn’t find the sense in his deduction and said so. “Huh?”
“Calliope.”
“Oh.” She nodded once, twice and understood Noah’s dilemma. “But it’s not anything like my conundrum.”
He grabbed her hand and squeezed. “No, of course not. I didn’t mean to imply it was.”
She knew that.
“Aren’t the trees beautiful?” he asked, looking and pointing to the palette of colors on either side of them. “I love autumn.”
She knew that, too.
Was it just fifteen minutes ago that she had never been happier? “I still can’t wrap my mind around it.” Alexandra O’Keefe-O’Ree was her mother. God.
“It’s my favorite season,” he said as he expertly maneuvered the monster vehicle around an extreme turn.
She knew that also and wondered whether winter would still be her favorite time of the year had she grown up as Alexandra’s daughter.
“We should be there in approximately ten minutes,” Noah said, looking at his watch.
“We don’t look alike ― Alexandra and I. Maybe Katie was wrong.” No, even if she hadn’t seen her birth certificate that Katie somehow had gotten her hands on, was meticulous at everything she did, double and triple checking, and Dallas would have believed Katie’s research and fact-finding was one hundred per cent accurate. Fact-finding. God. Now, she was a fact. A statistic. Besides being a child some woman, namely, Alexandra, didn’t want.
“Do you really believe that?” Noah asked, glancing at her.
She didn’t look like Lily, either. “Have you ever met Geoffrey, Lily’s father?”
“No. Why?”
“Just wondering what he looks like. Do you know what he does for a living?”
“Abbott mentioned it once, I believe.”
Dallas watched as he brought his brows together and pursed his lips. “And?”
“I think he said he’s a surgeon. You’re not going to cause a scene, are you, Dallas?”
She wiped the tears from her cheeks. “Don’t I have the right?”
He twisted his head this way and that, obviously humming and hawing mentally. “Of course, you do.”
Good answer. “I’m sensing a ‘but’.”
“But this is Abbott and Lily’s home where they live with their two daughters, two little girls who probably have never seen or heard their parents say a cross word to each other, who have been brought up with love and were taught to love and respect their elders.”
Something more struck her, something good. “I’m an aunt.”
“Antie Dallas.” He looked at her and smiled. “It suits you.”
She shook her head. “Given Alexandra’s my mother, that would be Auntie Dallas.” For the first time in the last twenty-five minutes Dallas laughed, an eerie laugh that frightened even her.
“My father. Who’s my father, Noah?” She couldn’t picture Alexandra in an intimate relationship let alone having sex with anyone. Maybe she didn’t. No, she would have had to. She’s her biological child. Why didn’t she want me?
Lily had joked that her mother was now receiving the Old Age Security. That would mean Alexandra would have been twenty when she was born. Why did mothers give up their children? Age. Too young to look after a child. Marital status – couldn’t raise a child alone. Unmarried – what will people think? Finances – unemployed and couldn’t afford the extra expense. God. Now she was an expense.
Dallas liked none of those options. Then she thought about another possibility, the horrible scenario that her mind skirted around when she listed possible reasons for Alexandra disposing of her. Dallas was the product of a rape.
Oh God. Her father was a rapist, the very scum she helped put behind bars all these years. Oh God. She could have arrested her own father at one time and not even known it.
Now, there’s a bedtime story for her new little nieces.
“Have you been to Abbott’s before? How do you know where to go? You’ve never been to Hampstead. Not that I know of anyway.” Of course, she didn’t know until a short while ago that she was a child who was given up by her mother at birth to be adopted by a woman her biological mother didn’t even know. Dallas could have been adopted by maniacs, for God’s sake. Oh, she knew the department of social services screened prospective adoptive parents. There were many lunatics leading productive lives, though, holding important positions, then going home and torturing little girls in the basements of their lavish homes in posh neighborhoods. She could have been one of those children.
Yes, Mother, did you think of that when you signed me away?
I did it for you, dear.
Yeah, right. Like she should believe that.
But didn’t Alexandra do right by her when she gave her up for adoption?
But Lily turned out all right. Lily was sweet, loving and warm. Alexandra must have done something right raising her.
Noah pulled into the Fenwick’s driveway, killed the engine and turned to Dallas. He held her hand and kissed her cheek. “Give me your gun, Dallas.”