Page 75 of Callum
The ticking of the second hand on the clock was the only sound in the room. It cut through the quiet. The thick cloud of disbelief and shock. The pounding of her heart.
Fiona opened and closed her mouth, not sure what to make of her sister’s words. Were they a lie? A means to get a rise out of her?
Her gaze shifted to her parents, begging them to tell her as much. “Is that true?” Her words were almost a whisper.
She’d never seen her mother so pale or her father look so scared. That’s when she knew. She didn’t need their words to confirm the truth—it was right there on their faces.
Tick, tick, tick.
The clock was too loud. The air too thick. God, she was choking.
She shot to her feet, her chair almost falling backward with the speed of her movement, and without a word, she walked across the room to the back sliding door and yanked it open. Cool air whipped across her face as she stepped onto the deck.
She didn’t suck in a single breath until she hit the railing. She curled her fingers over the edge to keep herself upright.
A lie. Her entire life was a carefully fabricated lie. Her parents…her sister…they weren’t related to her. Even Stacey wasn’t really her cousin. Not by blood. And they all knew. Had Stacey known?
Why hadn’t they told her? Why hadn’t they let her in on the huge secret that was her life?
Little things started to piece together. The way her sister shared her mother’s blue eyes and her father’s dark hair, but she had neither of those things. How Amanda and her parents were short, yet she was tall.
Her chest tightened again, holding in the air. Her birth mother was a drug addict?
The door opened behind her, but she didn’t turn to see who it was, just tightened her fingers around the railing as if that would stop her from falling while the ground beneath her disintegrated.
“Darling…”
Tears welled in her eyes at the sound of her mother’s soft, gentle voice.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she whispered, swinging around to look at the woman who’d raised her.
Her mother’s eyes became watery too. “We meant to. We always planned on telling you. But we just kept making excuses that it was never the right time, and then you grew up and we just…left it. We didn’t want you to feel less like ours.”
“It wasn’t your information toleave. I had a right to know.”
“You did.” A tear fell down her mother’s cheek, and she scrubbed it away. “It was selfish of us. It just got to the point where too much time had passed, and I thought you’d hate us for not telling you sooner.”
She dug her fingers so deeply into her palms that her hands ached. “Tell me how this happened.”
“It took us a long time to conceive Amanda. When she was two, we started trying for a second. We tried for years but couldn’t get pregnant. We were going to give up.” She paused. “Candy Holder…she was an old friend of mine from college. She got herself on a bad track and had issues with drugs. I didn’t even know she was pregnant. I hadn’t seen her for over a year. Then, we just woke up one morning to crying at the front of the house.” Her mother swallowed. “Your father went outside, and there you were, so little and wrapped in a tattered blanket in an old bassinet.”
Her heart turned at the thought of the person who gave her life just leaving her like that. “Did you try to find her?”
“We did. I tried reaching out to mutual friends. Looking into where she used to live. But I never shared with them why I was looking because a part of me knew, if I gave you back to her, you wouldn’t have a good life.” She paused, looking over Fiona’s shoulder, like she was searching for answers. “By the time we’d exhausted all avenues to find her, a couple of weeks had passed, and we’d already fallen in love with you. So we…we found someone who could forge a birth certificate. Fortunately, we were living in California at the time and hadn’t seen either of our families in months, so they didn’t know that I was never pregnant. We moved back home to Idaho and raised you as our own.”
Every word her mother spoke revealed a new layer of a life she’d never known about.
“It was when you were five that we searched for her again,” her mother continued. “That’s when we learned that she’d died a week after she left you with us.”
So many emotions flickered inside her. Grief that her birth mother was gone. Relief that she’d lived a better life than she was born into. “Is that why Amanda hates me?”
Sadness, deep and pained, carved into her mother’s face. “She was five, honey. Old enough to understand a baby had shown up on our doorstep. We pulled her away from her home and forced her to lie to everyone about who you were. I also think she struggled to share us with someone else.”
She nodded. Her sister’s hate ran deep, but maybe it was always just her own selfish belief that she should have been an only child. “Did I have a biological sister?”
Her mother jolted. “No. Not that we ever knew about. It was only you left at our door.”
She studied her mother’s eyes, looking for any signs of deceit. A day ago, she would have thought her mother could never lie to her. Today, that trust was fractured. “There’s someone out there who looks like me. I think they’ve even pretended tobeme a couple of times.”
