Page 32 of One Cry Too Loud
She turned the photo album toward me. I saw a picture of Alice and a little girl who I assumed was Cindy. They werestanding with a tall man with a receding hairline and a smile on his face.
“That’s him!” She repeated. “The man in the picture, the man Alice was married to, it’s Joe!”
CHAPTER 21
“Are you sure it’s him?” I asked, looking down at the picture in Holly’s lap. I examined it almost as hard as Holly was, peering at the photograph like it was an actual window into the past.
“It’s him,” the Englishwoman answered. “I know what my child’s father looks like.”
“This is insane,” Kat muttered from beside me.
“I’m so sorry,” Alice said as she walked back into the room. After Holly’s outburst, she decreed that we all needed a drink and a snack. As such, she strode into the living room with four bottles of root beer, two in each hand. Eli followed her with a platter of buffalo wings. They smelled amazing, and even though I wouldn’t have thought I was hungry my stomach started to rumble. “And it looks like the snacks are coming just in time.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” Kat said. “You were lied to. That’s not your fault.”
“What are you talking about? I wasn’t lied to,” Alice said, passing out the root beers and sitting across from on on a parallel couch.
“Of course you were,” Holly said. “Joe infiltrated your life in an attempt to get close to your daughter.”
“I know,” Alice said. “But he never lied to me about it.”
“Excuse me?”Kat asked. “Are you saying that you knew Joe was Cindy’s birthfather when you married him?”
“I knew long before that,” Alice replied, taking a sip of her drink. “I knew the first time I ever laid on him, and not just because I could see the resemblance.” She looked from Kat to Holly. “Cindy might have your face, but she has her father’s hair and his eyes.”
“I know,” Holly said. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I looked in on her a time or two.”
“I wish you would have called me. I could have introduced the two of you,” Alice said. “Cindy’s asked about her birth mother more than a few times.”
“She knows she’s adopted?” Holly asked.
“She does. She’s always known. I don’t believe in lying to my child, even if the truth might not be what she wants to hear at the time,” Alice answered.
“So she also knew that Joe was-”
“Her birth father? Yes. She did. She knew him as Harrison, though,” Alice said. “He told me that wasn’t his real name, but he also never told me what his real name was. He said he wanted to leave his old self behind. I respected that, even if it did leave me with more questions than I was comfortable with some of the time.”
“So, how did that happen?” I asked, leaning forward in my seat. “He just came to you one day?”
“He showed up on my doorstep,” Alice said. “I thought he was a salesman at first, and a bad one. He was fidgeting. He could barely look at me, kind of like the way you were when you came in here, Holly. He was sweet, though. I could tell that immediately.”
“I’m not sure ‘sweet’ is the word I’d use for someone who's done the things that Joe has done,” I said.
“Maybe not, but he sure put on a convincing front,” Alice replied.
“He was always good at that,” Holly murmured.
“He told me who he was and that he wanted to have a relationship with his daughter if I would allow it. He said he understood that he had no legal right to her and that, if I said I was uncomfortable with it, he’d leave and we’d never see him again.”
“But you weren’t uncomfortable?” I asked.
“Of I definitely was, but I thought about Cindy,” Alice said. “I wondered what she would think about it. I envisioned having to tell her this when she grew up, about how I stopped her from having a relationship with her birth father. I wondered what she would think of that, of what she would think of me if I did.” She shook her head. “I just couldn’t take the chance of her hating me for it. So, I pushed through my hesitancy, and for a while, I was very glad I did.”
“Because you fell for him?” Kat asked.
“We fell for each other,” Alice said. “It was slow at first, and then it seemed to happen all at once. Maybe it’s always like it. I don’t know, but it felt special. It felt real.”
“He’s good at convincing people of that too,” Holly said.
