Blake made a flippant gesture with his hands. “The first few times. The state took away their parental rights when I was seven.”
“That can’t be. It can’t be,” Shannon said miserably, tears draining from the corners of her red-rimmed eyes. “I was supposed to be doing the right thing. That’s what they told me. The best thing.”
“You couldn’t have known,” Mark heard himself saying despite his intention not to weigh in.
Always uncomfortable with crying women, he scanned the room for tissues and crossed to a table near the door separating the dining area from the kitchen to grab some paper toweling instead. She nodded her thanks and dabbed her eyes, her lashes spiky and wet.
He would have reminded her that adoption was often the best choice for pregnant teens, something she had to know from working at Hope Haven, but she wouldn’t hear him now. This adoption hadn’t been the best thing for this child. For Blake. He reminded himself who was central to this situation. He couldn’t lose focus of that fact no matter how much the tears tracing down her cheeks threatened to soften him with their salt.
“Okay, I need names, an address and a contact number for your current foster parents. We’ll contact them and the Department of Human Services when we get back to the post.” He wrote down the information the boy provided. “You came all the way from Rochester Hills? That’s about seventy miles from here. Did you walk all that way?”
“Hitched some of it.”
From the look of him, Blake had crawled the rest. But no matter how he’d gotten there, the boy had come a long way for answers from the woman he believed to be his birth mother, and he would get them if Mark had anything to say about it.
“Miss Lyndon, you said you gave up a child for adoption born when and where?”
“Nearly fifteen years ago. On March 7. In Shelby Township.”
He turned back to Blake. “And your birthday is?”
“March 7.”
He wrote a check next to the date in his notes. “And you were how old when you gave birth?”
“Fifteen.” She sniffed and wiped her cheeks with the towel. “I was sent away to stay with my grandma until he was born.”
“And the adoption was conducted through...?”
“A local attorney.” She coughed into her hand. “I wasn’t exactly given a choice.”
Doubt flashing through Blake’s gaze, he looked away. The boy was gripping his anger like a precious possession, and he wouldn’t give it up easily.
Mark tapped his pen on the pad. “The infant’s father?”
“MIA. From the beginning.”
Shannon Lyndon’s story was a cliché. As common as teen pregnancy. So the sudden rise of his anger at this unidentified deadbeat dad shocked him. He cleared his throat. “Now we have the basics, but, Blake, we need to know how you knew to come here. Adoption records are supposed to be sealed. How did you find out the identity of your...of Miss Lyndon?”
Shannon leaned forward, resting her arms on the table, curious, as well.
Blake pulled something out of the pocket of his filthy jeans and tossed it on the table. The crumpled piece of paper might have once been blue floral stationary, but now it bore only a faint blue hue.
“What is that?” Mark asked.
The boy didn’t answer, and Shannon only stared at the piece of paper as if she already knew what it was. Mark reached for it and unfolded it. His throat tightened as he read the smeared words written in a loopy script: “To my dearest baby boy...”
He skimmed the private message, its words those of a brokenhearted girl. At the bottom of the page, Shannon’s name and what must have been her parents’ Walled Lake address stared back at him, a confirmation in faded blue. He folded the note again and placed it on the table in front of him. Shannon and Blake only stared at each other, her pleading expression unable to breach the wall of the boy’s unbending one.
“They were supposed to give you that letter when you were old enough to understand,” she said in a small voice.
Her hands reached toward Blake, but then they froze, and she lowered them to the table, gripping them together.
“You trusted people who couldn’t even remember to feed a kid to keep a letter like that in a safe place?”
A strangled sound escaped Shannon’s throat. “I didn’t know.”
“Well, you should have.”
Shannon must have heard as much as she could bear because she buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders heaved with the force of her sobs. Each shake echoed inside Mark’s chest, and he couldn’t make it stop. If that didn’t shame him enough, his hands itched to reach over and pat her arm. Where was his professional distance when he needed it? Hadn’t he already learned the hard way not to be a patsy for duplicitous women?
He pointedly turned his attention away from her and back to Blake. “How did you know to find Miss Lyndon here? The address on the letter says Walled Lake.”
“They allow the internet in foster homes, you know. Sometimes they even have wireless.”
“Right.” Mark chose not to address the wise-guy comment. This time.
When Blake leaned forward and reached for the letter, Mark closed his hand over it. “Sorry. I’m going to need to make a copy of that. I’ll give it back later. I promise.”
“Whatever.”
He shrugged as if he didn’t care one way or another, but Mark wasn’t buying it. That letter had traveled with the kid through several foster homes for at least seven years. It was probably his most precious possession.
Mark turned back to Shannon, who was wiping ineffectively at her eyes.
“Miss Lyndon, do you have someone you can call in to stay with the young ladies? I need you to come to the post with us to sort out this matter.”
“The other social worker, Katie, should be here soon.”
“Then until she arrives you might want to speak with your residents.” He gestured toward the kitchen door. “They’ll probably have a few questions.”
“Oh. Right.” Bracing her hands on the edge of the table, she pushed back and stood. She started for the door, and then, as if remembering, turned back to them. “Did you still want something more to eat?”
Blake shook his head. “No, I’m full.”
Mark doubted that, but after the conversation they’d just had, he couldn’t blame even a hungry kid for losing his appetite. He’d certainly lost his.
“I’ll be right back, then,” Shannon said.
She paused in front of the door and then straightened her shoulders and pulled it open. Outside, a group of disobedient girls stood like a jury waiting for the foreman to announce a guilty verdict. Shannon froze, her hands stiff at her sides. Clearly, the girls had heard at least part of the conversation because they wore a collective look of shell-shocked fury.
Again, that temptation to protect the woman rose, intense and unwelcome, and it was all Mark could do to stay seated instead of stepping between her and her accusers. It wouldn’t have helped for him to tell them that they didn’t have as much of a right to their anger as Blake did, anyway. They felt betrayed. It didn’t matter that Shannon had been under no obligation to share the truth of her own pregnancy and adoption with a group of teenagers she counseled.
This was a muddy mess, with more than enough smears of anger and blame to cover them all in muck. But in the chaos, one thing had become disconcertingly clear to him: Shannon