Flipping through my contacts, I find the one I want.
Hank: How’d the test go?
Alex: Aced it. Thanks for helping me figure it out.
We text back and forth over the next half-hour and he tells me about robotics. Jorgenson is doing a good job as the coach but everyone liked me better. The design and build teams are kicking ass. Their programmers are bickering. And no one can decide how the driving is going to be split up, but they’re all convinced they’re going to crush it in the first competition.
Even via texting, this kid’s excitement is contagious, and suddenly I’m not feeling quite so empty.
How is it that I haven’t been able to muster even half the enthusiasm for the SpaceWalk project I have for the kids back at Bearings?
I ask him how Ms. Mitchel is, not really sure why I think I’m going to get more than a single word, fine, out of some high school kid and not really sure what I would want to hear even if I could. Do I want her to be as miserable as I am? No. What kind of a douche would want that for the woman he loved… even if he couldn’t have her?
But do I want her to be completely past everything? Hell no. So she could move on with some other perfect guy? I’m not that big of a man.
But where the line falls, I’m not really sure.
All I know for certain is that not one damn thing has felt right since the day we ended it. And I have no idea what it’s going to take to change that.
When nine o’clock rolls around, I pick up my phone like I do every night.
Moving on will probably require breaking this habit, but I’m not ready to do it just yet.
“Hey, Dan. How’d it go today?”
“Very well, sir. I picked Ms. Mitchel up at 7:00a.m. She was quiet on the ride to the school. Looks tired. A little thin, as we discussed. I offered her a muffin and some juice, but she declined. No incidents. Pick up from her classroom at 5:15p.m. She was alone. No incidents on ride home. The reporter from Tuesday hasn’t returned.”
“Thank you, Dan.”
ABBY
WE MAY HAVE some company, Ms. Mitchel. Single female outside your building.”
I look up, startled to find that we’ve not only arrived at my apartment, but that Dan has actually parked the car and opened my door. I quickly wipe at my eyes, hoping he didn’t notice the tears that have gotten to me again, only he’s focused on the woman wearing the narrow trench coat by my door.
Her back is to us and she’s huddled against the March cold and damp, and I wonder how long she’s been waiting. What she thinks she’s going to get out of me. Surely she has to know I’ve never given a statement to anyone regarding my relationship with Hank.
Dan is walking with me, his body between us.
The woman turns as we approach, her washed-out blue eyes meeting mine. I don’t recognize her but there’s something about her face that sets my nerves on edge.
“Ms. Mitchel?” Dan asks, and I realize I’ve stopped walking.
I don’t know her.
So why is she taking that tentative step toward me? Why is she saying my name in a voice I know from too many nightmares?
“Wait for me, honey… I’m gonna make things right… It’ll be you and me again… Just wait for me… Just wait a little longer…”
Dan asks the woman who she is, but I already know.
I feel like I’m going to be sick. I look back, but the only person I want to turn to is the man I’ve turned away.
I’m alone.
“You probably don’t remember me…” Her weak smile falters as she searches my eyes.
I can barely breathe. Because I know exactly who she is.
Candice. My birth mother.
HANK
WALKER IS A genius, and this project is going to be huge, but my head’s not in the game. I’m barely listening to the data on the new polymer and I feel like I’m about to crawl out of my skin. Like my gut won’t stop churning with this sense of wrong I can’t place.
I can’t stop thinking about Abby.
About Chicago. Alex and the rest of the kids who signed on to the robotics team. I’m thinking about the house on Sixth, and the apartment downtown that only started to feel like home once Abby started spending nights there.
Jack.
Greg.
Fucking Wilson, even.
“Mr. Wagner?”
I shake my head, pushing up from the conference-room table. “Apologies, folks. I have to excuse myself. Nate, take over, please.”
He doesn’t miss a beat, jumping in with a ready alternative. The guy is sharp. Motivated.
He’s all the things I ought to be.
I clear out of the conference room thinking I’m going to call Dan early… when he calls me.
“What’s going on? Is she okay?”
“She’s fine, sir. Physically there’s no threat, but there was an incident this afternoon. It’s outside the scope of our detail, but I expect you would want to know.”
This is why I hired him. “Tell me.”
“It’s her mother, sir.”
No. “Lauren? What happened?”
Already I’ve opened a direct link to Sheila.
“Not Lauren Mitchel. I’m unclear where the discrepancy occurred, but my files indicated her birth mother was deceased.”
Discrepancy?
“She is.” Abby only talked about her the one time, and I’ll never forget it. Her mother had been a junkie trying to get clean. It’s why Abby stayed in the system so long instead of being adopted when she was younger. Unfortunately, her mother got sick and died before she was able to regain custody. It was tragic and the reason Abby wasn’t able to give our relationship a shot. She’d spent years waiting for someone who had truly wanted to be with her but hadn’t been able to get herself well in time to do it.
I’d still thought maybe… for me, for us, she’d have been able to try.
“No, sir.” Dan clears his throat. “Her name is Candice Jefferson and she was here today.”
WE’VE BEEN ON the ground for five minutes already, and I feel like I’m about to bust out of my fucking skin waiting for the plane to get to the gate. Running through the little Dan had to tell me again and again.
“She went white as a sheet, staggering back like she’d taken a blow, sir.”
Dan knew something was off, but when Abby told him he didn’t need to stay, the only thing he could do was wait outside her door until this woman left. And call me.
It took an hour to get to the airport, but Sheila had a ticket ready and an airline representative waiting to usher me through security and onto the plane holding at the gate when I arrived. I’ve talked to Dan twice, but Abby’s phone is turned off.
I’m the first one off the plane and tear through the airport. There’s a car waiting for me when I step out into the frigid air and I scour the information my security guys have put together on Candice Jefferson on the way to Abby’s building.
There isn’t much. A handful of old arrests for possession, possession with intent to sell, shoplifting… Christ, solicitation. And then she seems to have turned it around, because the rest is an employment history that extends for pages. Most jobs lasting anywhere from a couple of weeks to a few months, nearly all with significant breaks between. None of it tells me what I need to hear.
Just over five hours from that first call, I’m striding up Abby’s walk.
Helen must have seen me coming because she’s waiting for me when I get off the elevator.
“How is she?” I ask, rubbing Helen’s arm as she wrings her hands together.
She shakes her head. “I offered to stay with her, call Lauren, but she wouldn’t let me. She told me she wanted to be alone. But”—Helen casts a worried glance toward Abby’s door—“I’ve never seen her like this. She just looks so broken.”
I knock at Abby’s door, praying she’ll answer. I don’t want to use the key Dan gave me unless I have to.
But then I hear the tumblers roll, the door cracks open and Abby is blinking
up at me, her eyes bleak and rimmed red.
“Hank?” Her voice breaks, gutting me.
“You mind if I come in?” I ask like I’ve just stopped by on my way home from Radio Shack instead of having spent the last five hours doing everything I could to get halfway across the country.
She nods once, her beautiful face beginning to crumple right in front of me. I haven’t even made it through the door before she steps into me, dropping her head and pressing it against my chest.
I stroke her hair as gently as I can, holding her against me where we stand just inside her door. Her tears soak my shirt, each one breaking my heart a little more.
“I’ve got you,” I promise against the top of her head.
Minutes pass like that, though I could stay here holding her all night if it makes her feel any better. But eventually Abby steps back, and when she does, I tip her face and gently brush the tears from her cheeks.
“You eat anything tonight?” It’s after ten and I’m guessing it’s been before noon since she ate.
“Not hungry.”
I nod and walk into her kitchen. She’s still got some of the Godiva hot cocoa mix I gave her, so I pull it out from the cabinet. “How about a hot chocolate, then?”
She looks like she’s going to say no, but then she just looks like she’s going to cry again and sits down at the kitchen table where we ate subs and drank beer. Where I kissed her until she clung to me like a koala and begged me to take her to bed. Where I thought our history had found its second chance.
When I’ve got the mug ready, I pull out the chair opposite and, yeah, I move it closer to hers when I sit down.
“Drink a little and let me know if I made it right.”
Okay, it’s a ploy to get her to have some, but it’s worth the play-dumb routine, because it earns me the barest hint of a smile. She takes a sip and then a bigger swallow.
When she sets the mug down, she stares into the swirling chocolate depths. “I’m sorry I lied to you. About Candice… my mom.”
Me too. I wish she’d trusted me with the truth, but I knew even back then how hard it was for her to talk about her life before being adopted.
“Do you want to tell me about her now?”
Abby takes a breath and lets it out slowly. “I was four years old when she left me in a convenience store. She shoplifted some chips and left without taking me with her. One of the clerks said she looked like she was high, that she’d barely been able to keep her eyes open. I’ve been told her walking out without me that day was probably the best thing that could have happened to me. There’s a part of me that’s always known it was true, but there’s another part…” She sighs, still not meeting my eyes. “She was my mother.”
My fists clench under the table at the thought of Abby being so vulnerable and alone. So scared.
“Did they track her down?”
“Yes. But she was a junkie and wasn’t able to take care of me. Still, no one likes breaking up families, especially when there isn’t another family member to place the child with. The plan was that she’d get clean and then get me back. She promised me she’d be back for me. That we’d be a family.”
I’m holding my breath even though I already know this story isn’t going to have a happy ending. Not for another ten years. Not until Lauren and Dale Mitchel.
Abby’s holding her hot chocolate against her chest and finally she gives me her eyes. “I’m sure she thought she wanted me back at the beginning.”
Christ. I feel like I’m going to be sick. “She didn’t come back?”
“No, she did. She made most of the court dates. She did the programs. She’d get better, but she was never quite ready to handle the responsibility of another person. It was always close. Close enough so the families who wanted to keep me couldn’t. Those first years, I was relieved that she wasn’t willing to give me up. That she would show up to fight for me. But then, the hurt of being let down over and over started to catch up. Even at eight years old, I knew when she begged that she was trying… she wasn’t trying enough. That if she meant what she promised, she wouldn’t keep slipping up. That if I really mattered to her, she would have found a way during those four years to get me back.”
“She couldn’t kick her habit.”
“She didn’t.” The distinction isn’t lost on me. “Not completely. Not when it counted, though from what I understand, she was clean a lot of the time.”
“Jesus,” I mutter, reaching for her hand, needing to touch her. Needing her to feel that I’m here. “Abby, why didn’t you tell me?”
If we’d only been together for a few months or even a year, I could understand. But we were together for four years. We were everything to each other.
“It’s… hard to admit that sort of thing. That I wasn’t important enough to my own mother for her to do what it took to get me back. That she—”
She pulls away and covers her eyes, like what she’s feeling is too painful to let me see.
But being on the outside of her heartbreak is killing me.
I push out of my chair and circle around her. “Come on, Abby.”
She gives me her hand and I lead her to the couch, where I pull her into my lap. She wraps her arms around my neck, twisting into my body.
“If she’d just let me go, I could have moved on with my life. But for years, she wouldn’t.”
And so Abby waited. Waited for the woman who was promising her she’d come back.
“And then, when I was twelve, something changed. She was clean. She was working. Her life was good. That’s what she said. Her life was good, but she didn’t think she could handle a kid.”
“No,” I choke, feeling like I’ve been gut-punched, like there’s no fucking way someone would do that their own child, to my Abby.
She takes a shuddering breath. “So she didn’t get sick. She didn’t die. I just said she did so I wouldn’t have to explain that, after everything, she just didn’t want me.”
I’m sick thinking about the hurt and shame. The heartbreak.
“Abby, I’m so sorry, baby. So damn sorry.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust you,” she says, like somehow in the midst of all this it’s my feelings she’s worried about.
Christ, I love her.
And I don’t want to ask her anything more, but I have to know. “What happened today, Abby?”
I’m praying this woman who has let Abby down through too many years of her life was here to beg forgiveness. To make amends.
“At first I didn’t recognize her. Not really. She looked nothing like the woman in my mind. The woman I haven’t seen since I was twelve and then only through a window at a social services office.” She takes a slow breath and I wrap my arms around her tighter, needing to ground her in the now. “She saw you and me together on some celebrity gossip report. Realized who I was, and came looking. I guess she thought with a boyfriend like you, I might be able to help her out with some cash, so she could move down to Texas.”
I open my mouth, but for the first time in as far back as I can remember, I don’t have an answer. A solution. A fix.
I don’t even have some words of comfort to make the woman I love feel any better about what happened to her. I’m fucking helpless, and I can’t stand it.
“After all this time, she finally comes back for me.” She lets out a humorless laugh that cuts at my heart. “But it’s only to ask for money… so she can leave again.”
We talk through the night. Her tears come and go, each one that falls slicing through my heart a little deeper.
Abby tells me about the life she had before the Mitchels gave her a new one. Before she met me. She tells me about the group homes. About the family that fought to keep her… about the promise they made to keep fighting, to make her a part of their family, and how two years later, when her mother finally gave up her rights and she’d been placed in yet another home, how she ran away to go back to them… Only to find th
at they’d adopted another little girl and didn’t have room in their new family for her.
She tells me about the day she was placed with Lauren and Dale, and how she stopped hoping. How she’d learned to deal by closing off her heart. And how they patiently helped her open it again.
I finally understand what was going on in her head that first day I met her at school, when she told me she wasn’t going to be there very long. Why she said no to me every time I asked her to do anything with me, even though I could tell she liked me. I finally understand and I fucking hate it.
This is why Abby couldn’t give us a chance. Why she would rather end things with me completely than wait for me to come back and risk being let down again. Left behind.
Because the woman she’d been hardwired to trust and believe in betrayed her. Not once. Not twice. But over and over again.
And now that I understand how she spent the first ten years of her life waiting for a woman who was never coming back, waiting to be let go, waiting for a family she could finally keep, waiting for someone to love her enough to wait for her…
Christ, the last thing I want is to make her wait one more minute for me. The life I have… isn’t the one she wants.
I finally understand, and I’ll never try to force it again.
ABBY
EVERY PART OF me is warm.
For a moment, all I do is lie there, eyes closed, soaking up the feel of Hank wrapping me up in his hold. I don’t want to move. I don’t want to breathe. I don’t want to do anything that risks ending this. Not yet.
Around midnight, we moved from the couch to the bed, neither one of us questioning whether he would stay. Hank helped me out of my clothes and then bundled me in his science fair T-shirt, his old hooded sweatshirt and a pair of his boxers left from that sweet and too-short period when he was staying here more than at home. And then he crawled under the covers with me, wrapping me tight in his arms. “I’ve got you.”
The day must have taken its toll on me because I don’t remember anything after that one whispered comfort, and now I’m awake and I swear I haven’t moved from that spot since we fell asleep.