“What happened a month ago?” he asked.
She pulled her shoulders back, as if bracing for a blow. “I tried to donate blood for my mother and the lab technician told me that mine wasn’t compatible with hers.”
Since he was a doctor, he honed in on the part of her statement that was most relevant to him. “What was wrong with your mother?”
“Leukemia.” The momentary hesitation and the slight press of her lips together was his only hint at the extent of her inner turmoil. The woman took a breath before she continued. “She died a little more than a week after that.”
“I’m sorry.” The words were not said automatically. Christian meant them genuinely. He had never learned how to separate himself from the sting of death, and though it made things difficult for him, he hoped he never could. If he were anesthetized to loss, it would rob him of his compassion.
Cate tried to shrug nonchalantly and couldn’t quite pull it off. The wound her mother’s death had caused was still too new, too raw. Even when she was angry with Julia Kowalski for the secret she had kept too long, there was still this huge hurt in her heart that her mother, the woman she’d loved and cherished, fought with and learned from for twenty-seven years, was gone. The thought, too, that she was no longer anyone’s child, but an adult in every sense of the word, was still new, still unwelcome.
“Yes,” she said quietly, “me, too.”
“Did your mother make a deathbed confession before she died?”
The irony of that still got to her. “She wouldn’t have even made that if it hadn’t been for the blood incompatibility.”
Not for the first time, she thought about how Julia Kowalski might have gone to her grave with the secret and she would have never known the truth. And subsequently she would have been at peace instead of feeling betrayed.
Maybe the truth was highly overrated. But now that she’d begun this, she couldn’t back away. She always needed to know. Everything. That had always been both her failing and her strength, the need to know, to fit in every piece of the puzzle.
Cate looked at him, her eyes capturing his. “How would you have liked to wake up one day to discover that your whole life was a lie? That you weren’t who you thought you were? That your parents weren’t your parents, that you weren’t a hundred percent Polish with just a hint of French, but God only knew what?”
Her eyes were stinging again. When was she going to get over this? she demanded silently. When was her anger going to burn away the tears?
“Do you have any idea how many stupid Polish jokes I had to endure while I was growing up? And I did it all for no reason. I’m not Polish. There was no great-great-grandmother who was an impoverished French countess. There’s nothing but this huge question mark,” she added.
She had an energy about her when she became animated. He found it difficult to look away. “So you’ve set out to erase that. The question mark in your life. What makes you think Joan’s your mother? Did your adoptive mother tell you?”
“No.” Cate’s mouth curved ever so slightly in a self-deprecating smile that did not reach her sad eyes. “I tracked her down. It’s what I do.”
And at least that much she was sure of. She was sure of her abilities. Everything else was up for grabs.
“Then you are sure.”
The deep baritone voice echoed in the room. Cate set down the coffee cup. There was a restlessness stirring within her. Cate attributed it to her less-than-successful encounter with her birth mother and was annoyed with herself. She usually had better control over herself than that.
She was also vaguely aware that the stirrings became more pronounced when Joan’s doctor was looking at her. It had been a long time since she’d even noticed a good-looking man.
Cate shifted in her seat. It did no good. She felt as uncomfortable in her own skin now as she did a moment ago. “I’d need a DNA test to be positive, I suppose. But Mrs. Cunningham didn’t exactly look inclined to submit to one of those.”
He could only imagine how having one bombshell after another dropped so quickly must have affected Joan. “This isn’t a good time for her.”
She looked at the doctor for a long moment. He hadn’t told her before when she’d asked, but the boundaries had changed. She tried again. “Why is she here?”
He was surprised that he was actually tempted to tell her. Christian attributed the momentary lapse to the sad look in the young woman’s eyes. A look he doubted if she even knew she possessed. A look he was particularly vulnerable to. But vulnerable or not, there were ethics to adhere to. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”
Cate blew out a breath, banking down frustration. “Doctor-patient privilege, yes, I know all about that stumbling block.” If at first… She tried another approach. “What kind of a doctor are you?”
“A good one, I’d like to think.”
The hint of amusement in his eyes got to her for a second. It was almost as if there’d been a tiny tidal wave in the middle of her stomach. The meeting with her birth mother had really shaken her up more than she was willing to admit. She focused on fact finding, something she usually did well.
“From the sound of it, at least a slippery one. Normally I’d attribute that kind of an answer to a shrink, but psychiatrists generally don’t walk around with stethoscopes slung around their necks—unless they’re into shock therapy,” she added dryly.
The seconds ticked away and he had to be getting down to his office, but something about her made him linger just a few minutes longer. He saw no harm in telling her his discipline.
“I’m a gynecologist.”
Her mind quickly flipped through the conditions attached to his specialty. “Only two things would have a woman as upset as Mrs. Cunningham looked even before I told her who I was. A change-of-life baby…” Her voice trailed off as something far worse occurred to her. “Oh, God, it’s cancer, isn’t it?”
He saw distress before she could mask it. He thought of what had to be going through her head. To find her birth mother, only to think she was losing her again. It made him want to tell her that things were being handled. But to say that, he would have had to admit that there was something wrong. And his allegiance was to his patient, not the blonde sitting beside him.
Christian shook his head. “I can’t tell you.”
She hated not knowing, hated being shut out. Frustration had her fisting her hands in her lap. “What can you tell me?”
“That if this is on the level and for some inner peace you need to have Joan accept you as her daughter, that you take this slowly. Let her get used to the idea,” he advised.
That would be his approach, it always had been. Slow and steady. Only once in his life had he jumped in with both feet, and that was to threaten Alma’s father to keep away from her.
“If Joan is your mother the way you say,” he added as he saw the protest rise to her lips, “she probably thought she’d never see you again. She certainly didn’t expect you to pop up on what she undoubtedly feels is one of the darkest days of her life.”
Was he doing that on purpose, teasing her with information he wouldn’t give her? No, she doubted that. Gut instincts told her that this was a man who didn’t tease. Too bad. The thought came from nowhere and she had no idea why it materialized in her brain. She began to entertain the thought that, just possibly, she was going a little crazy. Who could blame her?
Cate sighed, regarding him a moment in silence. Wondering what made him tick. Wondering what she could use to her advantage. He seemed nice enough, or else why would he be here, talking to her now? But his allegiance was clearly to his patient. “You won’t tell me if I guess right, will you?”
“I took an oath.”
“To what, torture the bastard daughters of your patients?” This time, Cate was certain she saw a hint of a smile quirk his lips.
“No, to keep my patients’ confidences just between us.” Christian debated for a moment, then decided to tell her the little that he could. �
��I will tell you this, though. Joan never mentioned having another daughter besides Rebecca.”
The laugh that left her lips was completely without humor. Her eyes challenged his. They were flashing with barely suppressed anger. He had to admit, the sight was compelling.
“And you would tell me if she’d filled out on her patient history form: ‘Gave away one daughter because I wasn’t ready to be a mother yet.’”
In her position, he was pretty sure he would have felt the same. But he wasn’t in her position. And his position was to guard Joan’s privacy. “If she had, I wouldn’t say anything. But since she hadn’t, I can tell you. I can also tell you that maybe you should think about signing up for an anger-management class.”
And who the hell was he to tell her what to do? She could feel her temper rising dangerously close to the surface. Cate squared her shoulders. “I can manage my anger just fine, thanks.”
Instead of getting up and walking out the way she’d expected him to, her mother’s doctor took her wrist and placed his fingers against her pulse. Her anger square-danced with a strange surge of warmth that washed over her.
“That’s not what your pulse is saying.” His eyes held hers. “It’s accelerated.”
Cate yanked away her wrist. The warm feeling stayed, but it was being smothered by a wave of anger fueled by indignation. “Maybe that’s because a good-looking man is holding it.”
Christian took it as a sarcastic remark. If there was the tiniest part of him that reacted, he attributed it to a trying morning, nothing more. He’d hoped that Joan’s tests would have returned negative from the lab.
“You have better control over yourself than that” was all he said. He took his cup, rinsed it out and placed it on the counter again. “I’ve got to go to my office.” After drying his hands, he put back the towel and saw that she was staring at him. “What?”
His comment about her having better control over herself than that left her momentarily speechless. Rallying, she searched for something plausible to say. Cate glanced at the mug draining on the counter. “I never saw a man rinse out his own cup before, that’s all.”
He had a feeling she was lying, but he went along with it. “Part of being allowed to use the nurses’ lounge. I remove all traces of having been here.”
“Except for the money you leave in the can.” She nodded toward it.
“Except for that.” It occurred to him that maybe the woman needed more time to pull herself together, although she didn’t look it. But he was the first to know that the exterior didn’t always give away what was happening beneath. People thought of him as stoic and he was anything but. It was only a role he took on. “You can stay here as long as you like,” he said as he began to open the door.
But Cate was already on her feet. She quickly rinsed out the cup he’d given her and was beside him in less time than he would have thought possible.
“I just took a few hours of personal time to try to resolve this.” The expression on her face was contrite. She realized that something this huge required more than “a few hours of personal time.” “I need to be getting back, too.”
Christian held the door open for her.
“Thanks,” she murmured. “For the coffee and the talk.”
“Even if it wasn’t fruitful?”
“Everyone’s got their own interpretation of ‘fruitful,’” she replied.
He couldn’t quite read the smile on her face. He supposed that was why the word enigmatic was created.
They parted in the hallway. He had a feeling deep in his gut that this wasn’t going to be the last time he saw her. The FBI special agent didn’t strike him as the kind of woman who gave up easily. She reminded him a great deal of his sister-in-law.
Christian hadn’t lied about needing to get to his office. He had patients scheduled all morning. But the first up was an annual exam with Sally Jacobs, who’d had no particular complaints when she’d made the appointment with his nurse. Christian decided that the annual exam could wait a few minutes.
Instead, he went back to Joan’s room to check on her. He wanted to see if the sedative had taken hold yet and if she was doing better than when he had left her.
Knocking once, he opened the door when he heard the muffled, “Come in.”
Joan was sitting up in bed, shredding a tissue into a hundred tiny pieces. Out of habit, Christian picked up the chart hanging off the edge of her bed to see if the right dosage had been given. There had never been any mistakes of major consequence at Blair Memorial, just a few minor inconveniences. Delays in lab results, a food menu lost, things of that nature. Nothing to warrant any anxiety. Checking the chart was a pretext.
His real concern was Joan.
After a beat, Christian set the chart back where it belonged and approached her. “Is the sedative helping any, Joan?”
For a moment, she didn’t appear to hear him. Joan seemed lost in thought, lost in her own world. A world that, if he read the signs on her face correctly, caused her a great deal of anxiety.
And then, just as he was going to ask her something, she suddenly said, “I got pregnant at seventeen.” There were tears in her eyes when she glanced up at him. “I’d only done it that one time.”
“Once is all it takes.”
She laughed sadly as she began to shred another tissue.
“I found that out fast enough. I was so scared.” When she turned her eyes on him again, he saw the frightened girl she’d once been. “One minute you’ve got the whole world up before you, the next, there are all these responsibilities. A baby.” She shook her head in wonder, remembering. “I was only a baby myself.”
Her breathing grew shaky as she relived that time again. “I had to tell my mother. Had to watch the disappointment on her face. And my father…” Her voice drifted off. There were things she was just unable to put into words, even after all this time. “They didn’t want me to have an abortion, so I went through it. The whole nine months.” She closed her eyes for a moment. A tear seeped through. “The checkups, the first kick, everything. Everyone said the labor would be hard, but it wasn’t.”
Joan opened her eyes again, looking at him. Silently asking him to understand, to forgive the sin that seeing her daughter again reminded her she was carrying. The years had made her forget.
“Giving her away was hard. Hardest thing I ever did. But there wasn’t anything I could give her. If I kept her, both our lives would have been over. I did the right thing,” she insisted.
“No one’s judging you, Joan,” he said kindly. “You did what you felt was right. But why don’t you admit to her that you’re her mother and finally put her mind at ease? You might put your own at ease, too.”
He wasn’t prepared for the fear he saw wash over her face. She shook her head from side to side. “I can’t, oh, I can’t.”
Was she afraid that her daughter would ultimately reject her because she’d been given away at birth? He doubted that Cate would have gone to all this trouble for that. He could be wrong, but he didn’t get the feeling that the special agent was a vengeful person. “She’d forgive you in time, Joan.”
Joan looked at him in confusion, and then she realized what he was saying. “But my husband’s family wouldn’t.” She began to explain quickly. “It’s taken me all these years to have them accept me. They never thought I was good enough for Ron, that he was marrying beneath him. If they found out that I’d had a baby before I met Ron—”
“People don’t stone women for having babies out of wedlock in this country, Joan.”
She laughed shortly. “You don’t know my in-laws. They make the townspeople in The Scarlet Letter look like the Muppets. If my husband found out—” She thought of Ron’s face and how it would look. His disappointment would be too much for her to bear. “No, they can’t find out. Nobody can.” She grabbed the doctor’s hand, clutching it as she implored, “Promise me you won’t tell them.”
Christian did what he could to set her mind at ease
. “Joan, I’m your doctor. In this case, it’s kind of like being your priest, listening to your confession. I’m not about to tell anyone anything. That’s up to you. Although I think you’d feel a lot better if you did.”
There was no way she would feel better. She was too old to start over. “I never felt good poor, Doctor. I’ve been poor. Rich is much better.”
Money was one thing, but it was far from the answer to everything. Joan Cunningham was a good woman. Would her conscience let her have any peace, now that her daughter had made a reappearance in her life?
“Right now, I want you to put everything out of your mind,” Christian instructed her. “I need you upbeat for the surgery.”
She’d forgotten about that for a minute. The specter of the surgery moved forward, casting its shadow over her. A firm believer in yoga, Joan closed her eyes, trying to picture herself walking along a long, winding beach. Searching for peace. Holding desperation at bay.
“I’ll do my best,” she whispered.
Chapter 11
The surgery went well.
Christian had lined up the best surgeon for Joan and assisted during the procedure. Sample tissues were rushed to the pathology lab while Joan was still under the anesthetic. The results were what they expected and they went ahead with the procedure that had been decided on.
Although the tumor turned out to be cancerous, it seemed to have been caught in time. Before it could begin spreading its poison. To be on the safe side, lymph nodes surrounding the area were removed. The prognosis was positive.
When he told Joan that she was going to be all right, she’d cried tears of joy. Of relief.
Her husband was in the room with her. The tall, gray-haired man had stood over her when the news was delivered and had stoically squeezed her hand. Christian remembered thinking that there seemed to be a great deal of bottled-up emotion within the man.
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