The infamous Adam Fraser. “He’s a lot more muscular looking than I pictured him,” she said, trying not to stare. There’d been a time when she’d wanted five minutes alone in a room with that man.
A time when she’d thought about writing to him, begging him to come home to his son.
A time when she’d hated him for all the pain and rejection he’d put Joe through.
“Comes from years on a fishing boat,” Joe said drily. He had his back to the man. “Who’s that?” he asked, nodding to her right.
Sue turned. Smiled at her cousin’s curious stare. Sam had moved on. “Belle.”
“Your cousin. She’s a couple of years younger than you.”
He’d remembered. “Right.”
“Is the baby hers?” Camden was sleeping, snuggled against Belle’s chest as though he belonged there.
Infants had an uncanny ability to adapt.
Especially ones who’d been passed from one pair of arms to another since taking their first breath.
“No.” Sue shifted her weight from foot to foot. “Belle’s not married. That’s Camden. He’s mine, too.”
With one last pointed look, Belle moved over to join her mother. Uncle Sam had disappeared. Probably to go check on Stan Wilson himself since the receptionist hadn’t yet produced him. Had he really been waiting for his mother to die so he could take over the Carson dynasty?
A dynasty of six.
“She’s cute.”
Joe’s words brought Sue back to the slight chill of the high-ceilinged foyer. She glanced over at Belle again, and then realized Joe was staring at the baby on her back.
“That she is,” she said, remembering the changing table that morning. She’d rubbed her face against the baby’s belly and Carrie had chortled out loud. The sound, one she’d heard countless times from more than fifteen babies over the past four years, had calmed her. Reminding her that everything would be okay. It always was. If you held on long enough.
“What’s her name?”
“Carrie.” Chosen by her mother.
“How long have you had her?”
“Since she was twelve hours old. Almost five months, now.”
“What happened to her parents?”
“There was no father named. Her mother’s young, has no means to care for her.”
The room was cold. The day was cold. Not even the memory of Joe’s friendship could warm her.
Grandma was gone. For good.
“I thought there was always a waiting list for newborns.”
“Her mother won’t give her up. She has six months to complete a state-ordered program as part of the process of getting her back.”
“How long until she regains custody?”
“Depends on the mother. Could be months. A year or two. Never. In the meantime, because she can’t be adopted, I keep the baby.”
“You could have her for years?”
“I could.” Sue couldn’t allow herself to consider the possibility or she’d get too attached. “It’s not likely, though. I’m sure her mother will come through. She wants this baby more than anything. In all my years of fostering, I’ve never had a baby for more than nine months.”
And in all the years she’d worked for Joe, he’d never asked her a single question about the kids in her care.
“And you had no problem giving it up after all that time?”
Now he was trespassing. “Having problems is relative,” she said. Her last long-term baby had been with her seven months. Dante’s mother had loved her son enough to straighten out her life. She’d visited every single day those last couple of months. Handing him over to her had been as much a celebration as it had been a loss.
“There’s always another one,” she said now, hoping that Dante’s mom was still as dedicated to her boy when he was three and four and into everything as she’d been when he was a cuddly little baby.
The revolving door at the front of the foyer turned again, admitting a middle-aged man with a briefcase and a cell phone pressed to his ear who disappeared through one of many identical doors.
Where were her parents?
And then something else dawned on Sue.
“I thought you and your dad’s half brother, your uncle Daniel, were your dad’s only family.” Joe had said so when his grandma Jo had passed away several years before.
“We are.”
“Your uncle didn’t die, did he?”
“No. He’s still here in San Francisco. Still in construction.” Though she’d never met Daniel Kane, Sue felt as though she knew him. Joe had idolized him.
Only nine years older, Daniel had been there when Joe was young, and hadn’t seemed to mind him tagging along. Adam’s and Daniel’s mother was Joe’s Grandma Jo—the woman who’d raised all three.
Daniel had given Joe his start in the construction business.
“So who passed away?” Sue asked again, staring at the man who’d fathered—and then abandoned—her onetime best friend. “Someone from his dad’s side?”
Adam Fraser’s father had been a soldier in World War II. He’d made it back from the war only to be killed in a car accident before Adam was even born. But apparently no one from his dad’s family had ever tried to see Adam. Or be a part of his life.
“He says he doesn’t know what’s going on.” Joe sounded more bored than anything. “He claims he got a call from some attorney and was told he needed to be here this morning for the reading of a will.”
“Surely the guy gave him the name of the deceased.”
“Yeah, but he says he doesn’t have any idea who the woman is.”
“That’s odd.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“You don’t believe him. You think he knows?”
“How many people get calls out of the blue telling them they’re supposedly named in a will of someone they’ve never met?”
“It happens.”
“On TV.”
“So what reason could he possibly have for lying?”
“Because he has something to hide?”
“Then why bring you along?”
“How do I know? I barely know the man.”
Hard to believe she’d once been privy to Joe’s every thought.
“You’re here.”
“He’s my father.”
That sounded like the Joe she’d known.
Uncle Sam strode back down the hall toward the foyer just as the revolving door turned again. Sue’s parents had arrived. Belle, still cuddling a sleeping Camden, stood with her mother to greet them.
And Sue’s cell phone vibrated against her hip. She recognized the number. Please God, she prayed silently as she turned from Joe to take the call. Let my third crib be filled. Not another one emptied…
Sue barely had time to finish the call—and certainly no time to digest the information—as her parents moved toward her.