by Marie Force
“Because you kidnapped his daughter more than twenty-five years ago?”
“Yes.”
“I have to go.”
“Mia—”
She pushed the button and handed the portable phone back to Wade. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Sit,” he said, closing the lid on the toilet and bringing the trash can closer in case she needed it. “Take some deep breaths. Find your center.”
Mia would’ve laughed, but he was trying to help her, so she didn’t laugh. Find her center? She didn’t even know who she was. How was she supposed to find her center? Her whole life was a huge lie. She took the breaths and tried to focus on getting air into her lungs rather than thinking about the chaos swirling around her.
“I woke up happy this morning,” she said after a long silence.
“Me, too.”
“I’m sorry, Wade. I… I didn’t know it was fake. I didn’t know any of this.”
“I know you didn’t.” He kissed the top of her head. “We’ll figure out what to do, okay?”
“It’s not your problem. I’d understand if you…”
“What? Left you because of something you didn’t know about?”
“It’s all so sordid.” She shook her head. “It makes me sick. I can’t imagine how you must feel.”
“I feel sad that you were kept from your father. I feel sad for him that he was kept from you.”
“What if… What if he doesn’t care about me?”
“He was fighting for custody of you. It’s probably safe to assume he cares—and that he’ll care greatly about hearing from you.”
A knock sounded on the front door.
Wade kissed the top of her head. “That’ll be Grayson. Come out whenever you’re ready, okay?”
“Okay.”
He left her, and she took a few minutes to pull herself together before she joined them in the living room.
“Hey, Mia,” Grayson said as he accepted a cup of coffee from Wade. “I was going to call you guys this morning. I talked to the Herald reporter, and it turns out that while the reporter wouldn’t say who his source was, he confirmed the person was at the yoga retreat where you met. That’s how the reporter confirmed you guys have known each other for two years.”
“Well, that’s one mystery solved,” Wade said.
Mia couldn’t make herself care that they’d resolved that issue when another one required her full attention. Would it ever end?
“Has there been a development in the case with your ex?” Grayson asked.
She shook her head. “No, something else.”
“Do you want me to tell him, hon?”
She didn’t know what she wanted. “Sure, thanks.”
Wade told Grayson what’d happened that morning, from Hunter alerting him to the fake Social Security number through her call to her mother and what had been uncovered.
“Holy shit,” Grayson said on a long exhale. “Your dad is Cabot Lodge?”
“That’s what she said. Why? Who is he?”
“He’s a Boston city councilman. Has been for more than twenty years. His search for the daughter who was abducted by her mother is big news in Boston. He’s never stopped talking about you or looking for you. His family is very prominent in the city. His grandfather was the mayor. His mother’s family was in the steel business. They’re loaded.”
Mia absorbed the information like a hungry sponge. The most important thing she heard was that her father had never stopped looking for her. “I… I need to get in touch with him.”
“He’s going to be elated, Mia. I knew him a little when I lived in Boston. There was always something so sad about him. People said that losing you broke him.”
“What will happen to my mother when this gets out?”
“I don’t know. I could put out some feelers and find out, if you want me to. We should do that first. We may be able to negotiate leniency for your mother because she told you.”
“Only because I forced her to. How is it possible that no one discovered the fake number before now?”
“They probably didn’t check it. Most people aren’t as thorough as Hunter is.”
“That’s a fact,” Wade said. “He takes anal to a whole new level.”
“I might never have known this,” Mia said. “I could’ve gone my whole life thinking my father didn’t give a shit about me, when in reality…”
“He’s been searching for you all this time.”
“I don’t want him to wait any longer,” Mia said. “He’s waited long enough.”
“Let me make a few calls,” Grayson said. “I have contacts in Boston who can advise me on how best to proceed.”
Wade handed him the phone and then put his arm around Mia.
“You have an important meeting at work today.”
“Nothing is more important to me than you are.”
Grayson paced the length of the living room as he made one call after another, working from the contacts in a cell phone that was otherwise useless to him in Butler. “She’s concerned about what’ll happen to her mother,” he said. “No, I think that needs to be a condition of her coming forward. She’d like to meet him, but she wants to know first what’ll happen to her mother.” After a pause, he said, “Let me give you the number where I can be reached.” He gave them Wade’s number and ended the call, promising to wait to hear back from whomever he was talking to.
“That was the agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston office,” he said.
Oh my God, Mia thought. The FBI?
“The case got a lot of attention when the abduction first happened. There’s been a warrant for your mother’s arrest since the day you disappeared.” The date he mentioned would’ve been when she was just over a year old. For twenty-seven years, her mother had been wanted by the FBI. Dear God. How was that possible?
They waited a very long hour before the phone rang again.
Grayson took the call and did a lot of listening before he said he’d consult with her and get back to them. “He spoke to the US attorney, and it’s not as simple as you not wanting her charged.”
“I would very much like to meet my father, but the only way that’s going to happen is if there are guarantees that my mother won’t be charged. That’s my final offer.” She had no idea where the strength was coming from, but she knew this was her only chance to negotiate leniency for her mother. Whether she thought her mother deserved it was a debate for another time.
“I’ll call them back.” Grayson made the call and conveyed her wishes to the US attorney. After he hung up, he said, “They’re notifying your father now that you’ve made contact. He has to agree before they can accept your condition.”
Mia’s hands were sweaty and her stomach felt sick. Needing to move, she got up and went into the kitchen to do the few dishes that were in the sink.
The phone rang, and she jolted.
“This is Grayson Coleman.” He was quiet for a long time, so long that Mia’s nerves were completely shredded by the time he said, “Got it. Okay. Will do.” Grayson stood to face her. “Your father has agreed to allow the charges against your mother to be dropped in exchange for the opportunity to see you. The prosecutor said he cried when they told him you’d been found. The only thing he wanted to know was how soon he could see you.”
Overwhelmed.
That was the only word Mia could think of to describe the emotions swirling inside her. Her father had cried when he heard she’d been found. That news brought new tears to her eyes. He wanted to see her so badly, he was willing to drop the charges against her mother.
“We’ll go to Boston today,” Wade said. “Right now.”
“You have work and things… Amanda is here. The store.”
“Fuck that. I’m taking you to Boston to meet your father. Today.”
Chapter 24
“Marriages… need constant nurturing… the secret of having it all is loving it all.”
—Dr. Joyce Brothers
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Less than an hour later, they were on Interstate 93 South for the three-hour trip to Boston. Wade had called Hunter to let him know what’d happened and asked him to pass the word to the rest of the family that they were going to Boston and would be back in the next day or two.
“Are you freaking kidding me?” Hunter had said when Wade told him what had come of the fake Social Security number.
“I wish I was.”
“How’s Mia?”
“Rattled and shocked and… I don’t know.” She’d kept her distance from him since learning of her mother’s deception. He hoped that once she got her head wrapped around it, she would turn toward him rather than away. But for right now, there was only distance as she processed this latest blow.
“Let us know if you guys need anything,” Hunter had said. “I assume it’s okay to tell the others?”
“Yeah, go ahead. It’s not going to be a secret for long.” Wade dreaded the publicity that would rain down on Mia once it got out that Cabot Lodge’s long-lost daughter had been found. Hell, something that sensational would probably make the national news. He hoped the mess with Brody didn’t get brought into it, too.
As they drove out of the mountains, Mia’s phone came to life, beeping with texts and voice-mail messages.
“Do you want to check that?” he asked.
“It’s probably more stuff about the other criminal case.”
“It might be your mother trying to call you again.”
Mia withdrew the phone from her purse. “I’ll text her to tell her I took care of getting the charges dropped and that she should leave me alone for the time being.”
“That’s probably for the best. You can reach out to her when you’re ready to.”
“If I’m ready to.” She looked over at him. “It was bad enough that I brought the Brody crap into your life. If I’d had any idea this was going to happen, too…”
“What? You wouldn’t have come?”
“No, I wouldn’t have.”
“Why do you think this changes anything for me?”
“It should change everything. Your wife isn’t who she said she was. She’s running around with a fake Social Security number.” She shook her head. “It’s sordid and disgusting and horrible.”
“Sweetheart, just like what happened with Brody, this was done to you. You’re a victim in both cases.”
“I’ve attracted the wrong kind of people from the day I was born.”
“You can’t help who you were born to or what happened to you when you were too little to have a say in it. That’s no reflection on you.”
“How can it not be? She raised me. She taught me the difference between right and wrong, and all that time, she was keeping me hidden from my heartbroken father? How do I ever reconcile that?”
“It’ll take some time to wrap your head around it, but you have to keep telling yourself you had nothing to do with what went down between your parents, Mia. You were a helpless baby caught in the middle. What your mother did was wrong, but she probably did it out of love for you.”
“Or so she says.”
“Have you ever doubted for a minute that she loved you?”
“No. She used to say it was the two of us against the world.”
“Did you have everything you needed growing up?”
She nodded. “We were never well off, but she worked two jobs to pay the rent and put food on the table. She came to all my stuff at school and was my Girl Scout leader for a couple of years.”
“That sounds like a very dedicated mom to me.”
“How could she take me from him, though? How could she do that to a man she must’ve loved at some point? She was married to him.”
“I don’t know, honey. My mom always says no one knows what goes on inside a marriage except for the two people in it.”
“I suppose that’s true. What if he’s a bad guy like Brody?”
“Gray said he’s very well respected in Boston.”
“Brody was well respected in Rutland.”
“He cried when he heard you’d been found. That says a lot to me about what kind of guy he might be.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You have good reason to be wary where men are concerned, Mia. Reserve judgment until you meet him. Nothing says you have to welcome him into your life. You’re doing the decent thing by going to meet him. Whatever happens after that is up to you.”
“I’m still getting used to having the power to determine my own life.”
“You’re the boss, baby. Whatever you want is what you should have.”
“Is it really that simple?”
“It is for me.”
“What if I said my fondest desire is to live in Europe? Would you move with me?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I want to be where you are, but I sure do love living in Vermont and working at the store with my family, as annoying as they can be sometimes. Maybe we could compromise by living somewhere in Europe for a month and visiting other places while we’re there?”
“I don’t really want to live in Europe. I was just wondering what you’d say to that.”
“Oh, phew. That’s a relief, because I wasn’t sure how I could help you make that happen.”
“I do like the idea of a month there sometime. That’d be fun.”
“Yes, it would. Where would you like to go?”
“I’ve never been anywhere, so it wouldn’t matter to me where we went. Anything would be an adventure.”
“We’ll have lots of adventures together.” He reached out over the console. “My hand is feeling lonely over here by itself.”
Smiling faintly, she took his hand.
“Ahh, that’s better,” he said, relieved to feel her coming around after the terrible shock she’d sustained earlier.
“When are you going to tell me I’m too much trouble?”
“When you’re too much trouble.”
“Seriously, Wade.”
“I’m dead serious. We’re not there. If we get there, you’ll be the first to know.”
Lincoln Abbott slid into the booth across from his father-in-law, Elmer, who already had a cup of coffee in front of him.
Megan brought over a cup for Linc and filled it at the table.
“Thank you, honey.”
“You’re here about Mia,” she said. “Move over.”
Startled, Lincoln slid over to make room for her in the booth.
Elmer smiled at her. “You’re definitely an Abbott now, sweetheart.”
“Thank you. I learned through years of observation. What do you know?”
“I know that she gave Hunter her SSN when she applied for a job with the company, and when he checked it, it came back registered to some woman who died in 1972.”
Elmer’s eyes bugged.
“Wait,” Megan said to her grandfather-in-law. “You haven’t heard anything yet.”
“Hunter told Wade, and he went home to ask Mia why she gave Hunter a fake SSN.”
“What did she say?” Elmer asked, hanging on his son-in-law’s every word.
“She said it’s the same one she’s always had, and she called her mother to ask where it came from. That’s when she found out that her mother kidnapped her during a custody dispute when Mia was a baby.”
Elmer blinked rapidly, his mouth falling open and snapping shut.
“All this time,” Linc added, “her father has been looking for her. He’s a bigwig in Boston. Grayson knows him and had heard about the guy’s missing daughter. Apparently, he never stopped looking for her.”
“This is just unbelievable,” Elmer said. “Poor Mia must be reeling.”
“She is,” Linc said. “Wade called Hunter to tell him what was going on. They’re on their way to Boston now so she can meet her dad.”
“What I want to know,” Elmer said, “is what about her mother? What happens there?”
“From what Wade told Hunter,” Megan said, “they got Grayson involved, and he talk
ed to the US attorney, who agreed to drop the charges after he talked to the father. Mia said she’d only meet him if the charges against her mother were dropped.”
“You gotta wonder how she feels about her mother after finding out she kept this from her all her life,” Linc said. “And the poor father. My heart just breaks for him.”
“This young lady our Wade has hitched his wagon to certainly hasn’t led a boring life,” Elmer said.
“To be fair, none of it was her doing,” Linc said.
“But still…” Elmer said. “It’s a lot.”
“It’s a lot for a new couple in a new marriage to deal with,” Megan said.
“Right,” Elmer agreed. “But he does seem very…”
“Smitten,” Lincoln said. “He’s gone over the girl. That’s obvious to everyone who’s seen them together. Even Mrs. Hendricks said something to me about how happy they seem when I saw her at the post office earlier.”
“Mia is the most interesting person to land in Butler since Cameron hit Fred,” Megan said.
The two men laughed at her blunt assessment.
“That she is,” Lincoln said.
“Although we had plenty of interesting people around here before then,” Elmer said. “Take yourself, for instance.”
“Awww, you’re very sweet to say so, Elmer, but I’m nowhere near as interesting as Cameron and Lucy and Mia.”
“Why would you say such a thing?” a deep, familiar voice asked from behind her.
Megan spun around to find her husband standing behind her, his brows furrowed. “I just meant that they’ve been out in the world and I haven’t. That’s all.”
“That doesn’t make you less interesting than they are,” Hunter said.
“That’s right, honey,” Elmer said, patting her hand. “Look at what you’ve done with your little corner of Butler. You’ve created a spot many people think of as a second home. That doesn’t just happen. It’s because you make us feel welcome here.”
“I… I didn’t mean to start something. I was just making conversation.” Megan got up from the booth. “I’ll let you guys talk.” She took off toward the kitchen.
“I’ll, um… I’ll be right back.” Hunter went after his wife.
