“What pictures?”
“Some I found in a newspaper article on the Internet. You’d just won the Ohio State alumni woman-of-the-year award.”
A miracle was happening. Or a catastrophe. And they were talking about the Internet.
“What makes you think I’m your mother?” She should have asked sooner. Would have, if she hadn’t been afraid she’d find out she wasn’t.
“You gave permission for your name to be made known, if I ever sought you out.”
She nodded. “I gave up hoping that would happen years ago.” She’d never given up the grieving, though. Not one day between then and now had passed without an awareness of the weight inside her.
He slid his hands along his thighs, to his knees. “So you don’t mind?”
“Mind?” Her face stiff, Sara smiled. Until her lips started to tremble. “I’ve mourned not knowing you every day of your life!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry! For what? You were a helpless baby!”
“You were mourning and I’ve known about you for seven years.”
He’d have been fourteen then. He’d known about her since he was barely a teenager. From the time she was thirty. Before she bought this house—when she’d still been counting on having another child.
“And you owed me nothing,” she told the son she’d had when she’d still been a child herself. “Don’t you ever feel sorry for your part in any of this. Not ever.” She carried around enough shame, anger and grief for all of them.
He nodded and she sat back, studying him further, finding every aspect of his face fascinating. And the way he held his hands, as if he was always aware of them, always in control of them.
“What do you think?” His question startled her, embarrassed her.
“That you’re everything I’ve imagined you to be. And more.”
“You don’t even know me yet.”
“Based on what I’ve already seen, I know that you can be kind. Compassionate. Gentle. You’re working in an admirable profession and obviously have lived your life in such a way that allowed you to pass the rigorous background checks necessary to be a law enforcement officer.”
“Just like your father was.”
She drew back, frowning. “Just how much do you know about me?” It was disconcerting, having this perfect stranger, this flesh of her flesh, aware of facts of her life—while she, who’d been yearning for even one word of him for more than twenty years, knew nothing.
He glanced down, his cheeks turning red, and when he sought her gaze again, his expression was pleading. “Can we start over? Or at least go back a little bit? I honestly had this whole thing planned and… I don’t know…” He shrugged. “Being here, meeting you. It’s not at all like I thought it would be.”
He was a planner. Just like she was. Except that she hadn’t been—until that awful night so many years ago.
“How did you think it would be?”
He made a face. “Businesslike.”
Her heart dropped. “Is that what you’d like it to be?”
“No!” Ryan sat forward, his hands on his knees, as if ready to push off. She expected him to stand, but he turned to look at her instead.
“I… Can I start at the beginning?”
Pleased by his strong need to stay, Sara smiled. “Of course. Especially if you’re going to tell me about you. It’s strange having you know things about me, when I don’t know anything about you beyond the fact that you made me sick to my stomach for three months straight, kicked like a soccer player and were so eager to be born I barely got to the hospital in time.”
And she also knew that he’d been a perfect baby boy. That he’d weighed seven pounds even. Been born at 3:58 a.m. And had a full head of sandy-colored hair.
“Really?” He grinned. Sat back. “I never knew that.”
“How could you?” Not even her parents knew that. They’d been out of town for the weekend, leaving Sara home alone with a neighbor on call next door. She hadn’t been due for another three weeks.
She’d taken a cab to the hospital. And called them after her son had already been whisked away.
Having Ryan had been something she’d had to do on her own.
Right now, he looked as if he was waiting for her to elaborate. She wasn’t prepared to go back there. Not yet. She’d spent twenty-one years running in the opposite direction.
“You were going to start at the beginning.”
Ryan told her about the youthful rebellion that had ended with his parents encouraging him to pursue finding her, if that was what he needed in order to have a sense of identity.
“I was shocked,” he said, one knee up on the couch as he turned to face her. His arm stretched along the sofa back until he was almost touching her shoulder.
Sara relished the closeness, the warmth of his fingers nearby. She wished she had the right to hug him, to fill the emptiness she’d felt in her arms since the day he’d been born.
“I knew I was adopted. I’ve always known. But I never asked about my birth parents, figuring it would hurt my real parents’ feelings.”
He stopped. Sara raised her brow.
“I was going to apologize.”
“They’re your real parents, Ryan. Never doubt that. I played a biological role in your life, nothing more.” The words just came out.
“How can you say that?”
“It’s what I’ve been telling myself more than half my life.”
It was the only way she’d survived without him.
“Do you really believe that?”
They were traveling backward again—to places that hurt a great deal.
“I believe I want to hear the rest of your story.”
He studied her a moment longer and then, to her relief, he continued.
“My mom called the adoption agency for me and a couple of weeks later I came home from school to find a letter waiting. It told us your name, and that you lived in Maricopa.”
A town just outside Montgomery County, near Dayton. A little over an hour from Columbus. She’d grown up there.
Ryan had been born there.
He pulled a document out of his back pocket and handed it to her. “And there was this.” A copy of his birth certificate. The official one with her name on it, next to the words Baby Boy Lindsay. That piece of paper would only have been released to one person—her son.
“I came to Columbus to go to Ohio State, got married and never left,” she said inanely, so disoriented she couldn’t think straight.
He nodded. “I know.”
There it was again. That knowledge he had.
“You never wanted to contact me?” God, she sounded pathetic. And the question was completely unfair.
He grimaced, shrugged. “Sure I did—some of the time. But I knew you were married. I didn’t know if he knew about me, or if you’d welcome the idea of a potentially painful reminder from your past showing up on your doorstep.”
“I would have welcomed you. Instantly. Any time.”
She couldn’t speak for Brent. Wouldn’t