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He turned into the parking lot of the sheriff’s department. She scanned the lot for her rental car and was reassured to see it.
“Have you found a place to stay yet?” he asked.
God. She almost had to stay for a few days, didn’t she? She’d raised expectations, and she didn’t want to hurt those people who had looked at her with such hunger and happiness and puzzlement. And then there was the whole press conference thing, which really scared her.
Aghast, she suddenly wondered whether Canosa would even want her back. The food and atmosphere were supposed to be the focus, not one of the waitresses. What if people stared? Went there just to see her?
Maybe she could change her appearance. But would brown hair or glasses fool anyone who had once seen a good photo of her? Say, on the cover of People magazine?
Her stomach dipped. With an effort, she dragged her attention back to his last question.
“No. I assumed there’d be a hotel in town, or I could drive back to Mount Vernon.” It was a county away, but straddled the I-5 freeway, making it busier than off-the-beaten-track Stimson, which wasn’t on the way to anything but the Cascade Mountains.
“There’s a Quality Inn.”
She nodded; she’d seen it as she’d turned into town.
“Also a more rustic place just out of town called the River Inn. And a couple of bed-and-breakfasts.”
No B and Bs. She didn’t want to have nosy hosts or have to share a breakfast table with other guests. “If they have a vacancy, the Quality Inn will be fine.” The more anonymous the room, the better.
“Until the press arrives,” Seth said. “Then we’ll have to think of something else.”
She shuddered.
He gave her a quick look as he finished parking, then gripped her hand again.
“Will you have dinner with me, Bailey?”
“You can’t possibly want—” she began in panic.
He interrupted. “I want.” There was the smallest of pauses during which she tried to interpret his enigmatic tone. “It’ll give us time to talk this out. You can ask some of the questions that must be on your mind. We can plan our strategy.”
“You can ask questions,” she said with quick hostility.
He did the eyebrow lifting thing really well. “I won’t tonight, not if you’d rather I don’t. We will need to talk eventually about what you remember about your abductor. I’m a cop, Bailey. If he’s still out there grabbing little girls, he needs to be stopped if there’s any way in hell I can locate him.”
What could she do but nod? She hated the idea he might have another little girl right now, who called him Daddy. She had spent most of her life blocking out those images, except they crept into her dreams.
“But this evening—” Seth’s voice had softened “—we’ll set that aside. I think it would be better for you to talk out what you’re feeling than go hide in a hotel room.”
“I’m used to being alone.” It burst out of her before she could think twice. “I like being alone,” she said softly. Not answering to anyone.
He turned off the engine and sat waiting, just as he had in front of the Lawson home. A patient man, he knew when not to push. And that made him a dangerous man, too, she thought, at least to her.
“Fine,” she said, disgruntled but grateful all at the same time. She hadn’t been ready to stay at the Lawsons’ for dinner, but the idea of getting takeout and eating in a hotel room by herself held no appeal, either. At least, Detective Seth Chandler offered distraction.
“Okay,” he said, as if the outcome had never been in doubt. “I need to go in and check messages, make a few calls. Why don’t you check in at the Quality Inn, and I’ll pick you up there?”
“Fine,” she muttered again.
He smiled and took out his phone. “Give me your number so I can call when I’m on my way.”
She told him. Apparently not trusting her, he touched Send and waited until the phone in her bag rang. Then, satisfied, he put his away. His hand emerged from his pocket with a business card, which he handed her. “My number.”
He insisted on walking her to her car. Bailey had no doubt he memorized the license plate number, just in case she ran for it. Then he let her go, but kept watching until she turned onto the main street and she could no longer see him.
At which point she pulled to the curb, put the car into Park and bent forward, resting her forehead against the steering wheel. And then she did her best to breathe as she struggled with the kind of roiling emotions she hadn’t let herself feel in something like ten years.
Strangely, it was a picture of the man she’d just left that she fastened on. His physical strength, his relaxed, purely male walk, the big hand he’d touched her with whenever he sensed she needed support.
How did he know?
Breathe.
He just did, she admitted. Somehow, those dark eyes saw deeper than she liked. Except today, she was grateful.
A new swirl of panic joined all her other fears. She couldn’t let herself depend on him. She shouldn’t have agreed to dinner. When he called, she’d make an excuse.
Bailey moaned, knowing she’d just lied to herself. Yes, she had to be careful where he was concerned, but right now, she needed him. She, who never let herself need anyone, wasn’t sure she’d get through these next few days without the man she’d met less than three hours ago.
* * *
EVE’S MOTHER—ADOPTIVE MOTHER—laid down her fork. “I keep thinking I dreamed it. But Hope really was here, wasn’t she?”
This was probably the tenth time she’d said something similar since they sat down for dinner. All she’d done was stir her food around.
Dad laid his big, scarred hand over hers in a gesture more tender than Eve remembered seeing. “She was. We’ll see her again in the morning.”
Eve didn’t have much appetite, either. She’d done a lot of scrambling to make up for opening her big mouth at the sight of her sort-of sister.
“I only meant biological,” she had explained.
Apparently that was good enough, because they immediately dropped the subject and went back to exclaiming in shock and awe.
Hope, Hope, Hope.
And I’m being such a bitch, Eve thought miserably. She should be grateful to Hope, whose disappearance had given her a chance to have a family. Nobody else had wanted the rail-thin, withdrawn eight-year-old she had been when the Lawsons had taken her in.
She’d always known the truth. They hadn’t taken her because they’d fallen in love with her, but rather as penance. They felt guilty because they had failed their perfect daughter. For their own spiritual salvation, they needed to save another child.
Which still didn’t mean she hadn’t been lucky to be that child.
She remembered her first visit to this house, when Kirk had opened a door partway down the hall and said, “This will be your bedroom.”
Now she knew it had been a guest bedroom before she had arrived. Then, given the way she’d lived before she got taken into the foster system, she’d been thrilled because she’d have a queen-size bed all to herself and her own dresser and closet and everything.
Karen had stepped into the room behind Eve and looked around. “We’ll paint and decorate once you’ve decided how you’d like it to look,” she said. “What is your favorite color?”
“Pink,” she had whispered, and then seen the expression on the face of a woman who was thinking about becoming her mother. “And yellow,” she said hurriedly. Yellow, she saw, was safe.
She had lived with them for a week before she worked up the courage to open the door to the other bedroom that nobody went in or out of. I want this bedroom, she’d thought, indignation swelling in her, but she never said a word, because she knew. It was her bedroom. The lost daughter the social worker had told her about. The Lawsons had insisted that of course they would keep Eve even if Hope was restored to them, but then, she wasn’t sure she believed that. She’d stared at the pink bedroom with furniture painted white and edged with gilt, and at shelves filled with dolls dressed in beautiful clothes, and most of all at the bed with tall posts and gilt-painted finials and a white lace canopy, and she had envied until she ached.
She had mostly been ashamed of that envy, because the pretty blonde girl in all the pictures was probably dead even though her parents kept her bedroom for her and told everyone that they knew she was alive and would come home someday. But the envy had crept into her heart and stayed no matter what she did to root it out, and today it had made her say, “The real daughter returns.”
Of course Mom and Dad were ecstatic. They’d been given a miracle. Eve loved them. She had dreamed of seeing them truly happy, and now they were.
Just not because of any accomplishment of hers, any gift she gave them. She’d always believed, in the back of her mind, that she was engaged in a competition. She’d just never let herself see that it was one she couldn’t win. Her bringing home a gold medal in athletics, being accepted to Harvard Law School or crowned Miss America, none of those achievements would ever have erased the grief that cast its shadow over both of them. Only the return of their precious Hope could do that.
And I am happy, Eve told herself. Just...envious, too.
She smiled at her mother. “Hope’s coming to breakfast?”
Karen Lawson’s face was both softer and younger than Eve had ever seen it. “Yes. But remember she asked us to call her Bailey. Oh!” She hugged herself. “I can’t believe it.”
Eve offered to come over and make breakfast, but no, Mom wanted to make it with her own hands, because she’d been cheated of the chance of feeding her daughter so many other breakfasts.
“Waffles,” she decided. “Or crepes. I have all those lovely raspberries. Oh, my. I should have asked her what she likes.” Her expression cleared. “But of course she loved raspberries. Do you remember, Kirk? That time we took her with us to pick berries, and lost sight of her for a minute?” That clouded her face momentarily, but the smile broke through again. “And when we found her she was stuffing herself with berries, and her hands and face were stained with the juice?”
He chuckled. “She tried to claim she hadn’t been eating them and was astonished we didn’t believe her.”
How touching, Eve thought. My little sister lied.
And I am a lousy human being.
* * *
DAMN, SHE WAS BEAUTIFUL. Seth didn’t understand this intense reaction to Bailey Smith and wasn’t sure he liked it. He didn’t want to think it was related to the triumph of finding her. As in, I’m the creator.
That was just creepy.
The corner of his mouth twitched. Frankenstein’s monster, she wasn’t.
He had been tempted to take her home and cook dinner for them, but had had a suspicion she wouldn’t like that. Plus, this might be their last chance to go out in public without being noticed.
So he’d taken her to a local diner with high-backed booths and asked for the one in the far corner. Once the waitress led them to it, he didn’t give Bailey the choice. Instead, he slid in with his back to the wall facing the room and the door. It would have been his preference anyway, but what he liked tonight was that no one not standing right in front of their table would see her face.
After they ordered, she looked at him with big, clear eyes that were more gray than blue in this lighting.
“Eve wasn’t thrilled by my appearance.”
He’d been waiting for this one, and found himself in a spot. He’d silenced a call from Eve on the drive here from the hotel. He’d have to talk to her, if only to tell her he wouldn’t be calling again. An uncomfortable conversation he’d been avoiding. The last time they’d had dinner was almost three weeks ago. He’d been taking the coward’s way out, hoping she’d clue in to his waning interest.
He’d made no promises and had nothing to feel guilty about, except that it was damn awkward to have these feelings for Eve’s sister.
“I noticed that,” he admitted. “In a way, I’m not surprised. What did surprise me was that she didn’t hide how she felt.”
“Her parents were really taken aback.”
“I was glad Eve wasn’t there when Karen said that about the two best days of her life.”
“Because they were both associated with the real daughter,” Bailey murmured. “The one who doesn’t remember them and isn’t sure she wants to be bothered to get to know them.”
The one, he suspected, who didn’t want to admit she hungered for family.
“You knew Eve, too?” she asked.
He hesitated. “She and I dated for a while. I actually became interested in your disappearance after hearing the story from her.”
“Really.” It was as if he’d confirmed something she had already guessed. “‘Dated.’ Past tense?”
“Uh... I haven’t called her in a few weeks. It was never more than casual.”
She scrutinized him for an unnerving moment. “I shouldn’t have asked. It’s none of my business.”
Sure it is. His reaction was immediate and powerful. Seth didn’t share it.
“I don’t blame her if she resents me,” Bailey continued, sounding thoughtful. “When you first mentioned her, I couldn’t help thinking, So they replaced me. I’d have resented her, if I cared. You know.”
He knew. She had felt a pang of resentment she refused to acknowledge.
“When Eve first told me the story,” he said, “she sounded offhanded about it. ‘Here’s something out of the ordinary.’ I don’t think it crossed her mind I’d go anywhere with it, even though she told me because she knew I regularly work cold cases. Once I dug into it...” He hesitated, then shrugged. “She didn’t want to talk about it anymore. If I asked a question, she’d claim she didn’t know anything. Some bitterness may have been building...” He frowned. “I was going to say because her parents were suddenly obsessed with their loss again, but that isn’t really what happened. The truth is, I doubt an hour has passed in the last twenty-three years that Karen and Kirk didn’t think about you. They’d quit talking about it, that’s all. Until I gave them hope.” He grimaced at his choice of words. “Sorry.”
“I think I could hate that name.” Her voice was sharp. “It’s sappy. And, God, so wrong, considering what happened. And so wrong for me.” She pointed her thumb at herself. “The me I am.”
“Who are you, Bailey Smith?” he asked softly.
Her gaze clashed with his. “I’m not a nice person, in case you haven’t already figured that out. I don’t make close friends. I don’t have boyfriends.” Her warning was clear. “Don’t trust people.” Her tone curdled. “I am what he made me.”
Speaking of bitterness.
“That’s not true,” he said calmly, reaching for a roll, tearing it open and buttering it.
Her chin jutted. “You don’t know.”
“You enrolled in college. Did he have a single thing to do with making you the woman who’d do that?”
“My major. There’s nothing subtle about that.”
“No, I guess there isn’t. You’re trying to figure yourself out. Maybe him. But he wouldn’t have liked you doing either, would he?”
She finally looked away. “No. But my interest is because of him.” She didn’t have to say how much she hated knowing that. “If it never happened, if I’d grown up here as sunny Hope Lawson, who knows? I’d have probably gone off to college at eighteen and majored in literature or biology or dance. But psychology?” She shook her head.
“You’re right,” he agreed. “You’re a more complex person than you would have been. I won’t argue with that. Given what happened to you, I think it’s remarkable what you’ve become.”
“And what’s that?” she asked, the edge present.
“A smart, self-aware, poised woman who may claim she isn’t nice, but who was kind today to two people when she didn’t have to be.”
