LITMIR.BIZ

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All trace of the dead man’s small office was gone.

      “Twelve, fifteen years ago. Without him, there was no agency.”

      She watched the doctor’s eyes for signs of nervousness. Seeing none still didn’t convince her. He could just be a convincing liar. After all, he’d allowed her to believe a lie all these years. “You’re sure?”

      Doc Ed spread his hands wide. “I have no reason to lie to you, Catherine.”

      “You had no reason to keep my adoption from me, either,” she pointed out.

      “Not my call, Catherine.” He leaned back in his chair, an old leather chair that had long since assumed his shape. It creaked slightly as he studied her. She was a strong-willed girl, she always had been. She would get through this, but not easily. “For what it’s worth, I thought your father was wrong, keeping this from you.” He laughed softly to himself. “Big Ted was absolutely fearless, but you were his Achilles heel.”

      Her eyebrows drew together. That didn’t make any sense to her. Achilles heels signified a weakness. She’d never held Big Ted back. “I don’t understand.”

      “If you had wanted to call someone else ‘Dad,’ it would have killed Big Ted. You were the sun and the moon and stars to him.”

      How could her father have even thought that she’d turn her back on him and all their time together? Turn her back on the man who’d taught her how to ride a dirt bike, how to play baseball, how to fish. She’d been the best boy she could be for her father, and all the while the relationship she’d believed in didn’t even exist.

      “But he didn’t trust me.”

      The accusation surprised Doc Ed. “What?”

      “He didn’t trust me,” she repeated. “My father didn’t trust me not to leave him, not to think of him differently once I knew that I didn’t have his genes in my body.” She leaned forward, trying to make Doc Ed understand what she was still trying to grapple with herself. “Don’t you see, if my father had told me I was adopted, it would have been no big deal. I knew a couple of kids in school who were adopted and they were okay.

      “But he didn’t tell me. Neither of them did, and that made it a big deal. That they couldn’t tell me the truth. And the truth I knew was a lie.” Restless, she ran her hand through her hair. “Now I’m not really sure about anything anymore, least of all who I am.”

      Doc Ed reached for her hand and forced her to look at him. “You’re still Catherine Kowalski,” he told her firmly. “You can call yourself Watermelon, it makes no difference. You’re still Cate.”

      Despite herself, her mouth quirked in a half smile. “Watermelon, huh?”

      “Watermelon,” he repeated.

      Her smile faded and she shook her head. “It’s not the name that matters, Doc. It’s the truth that makes a difference. And the truth is that someone else gave birth to me, that there are genes inside of me that didn’t come from the people who, until a couple of hours ago, I’d thought of as Mom and Dad. The truth is, I thought there was no secret in my family and there is. And it’s a whopper.”

      Doc Ed folded his hands on the desk and looked at her over his glasses. “So what are you going to do? All the records that might have given you a clue are long gone.”

      Maybe not, she thought. Maybe someone had claimed them, stored them. Something. But she wasn’t going to deal with that now.

      “For the time being, I’m going to stay where I’ll do the most good, right here with my mother.” She noted how he smiled when she still referred to Julia as her mother. “I’m putting in for a leave of absence so I can be with her for as long as I can. After she gets well, we’ll see.”

      Unlike his colleagues, he believed in dispensing hope if there was even so much as a shred to be had. But even he couldn’t find it within his heart to allow her to deceive herself like this. “Cate, you know that she might not get well.”

      Cate squared her shoulders, the look in her eyes forbidding him to say anything more. “Please,” she whispered the word quietly, “I’m dealing with one truth at a time.”

      Two and a half weeks later, Cate found herself standing at her mother’s gravesite. It was raining, which seemed somehow fitting. She’d been angry at the sun for daring to shine the day of her father’s funeral so many years ago.

      She was only vaguely aware that her partner, James Wong, was holding an umbrella over her head, keeping her dry. Vaguely aware of the world in general. She felt as if she was walking along on the outside of a huge circle, looking in.

      She’d refused the Valium Doc Ed had offered her just before the ceremony. She didn’t want to be any more numb than she already was. Numb from the loss of a woman she’d loved with all her heart and had thought of as her mother to the very end, despite everything.

      Numb from the realization that she’d been lied to for the past twenty-seven years of her life.

      Numb because there were no foundations beneath her feet, no walls around her to protect her. She was bare and exposed. Completely and utterly adrift in dark waters. And for the first time in her life, she had no sense of identity. She had no idea who she was, or who she might have been meant to be.

      She wouldn’t know anything until she found the answers to the questions that had been battering her brain for the past two and a half weeks.

      Ever since that day in her mother’s hospital room.

      Just before the end, her mother had begged her to forgive her and of course she had. She bore no malice toward the people who had done everything in their power to make her feel loved and secure. But it didn’t negate her desire to discover her birth parents and, with them, her roots.

      Cate realized that the priest had stopped talking. The ceremony was almost over. Someone handed her a white rose. She went through the motions, kissing a petal and then throwing the flower onto the deep-mahogany casket that lay nestled in the freshly dug grave.

      As she looked down, she felt her heart tightening within her chest.

      Julia Kowalski had died three days ago. And now she and Big Ted were together again.

      And she was alone. Completely alone. With no family to fall back on.

      Neither one of her parents had had any siblings. Cate had always thought of herself as the only child of only children. Now she no longer knew what to think, what to feel.

      Except for alone.

      Everyone gathered at her parents’ house after the funeral. Betsy Keller, her mother’s best and oldest friend, had taken over and handled all the arrangements. Had insisted on it.

      “You have enough to deal with, poor thing,” she’d clucked sympathetically several times during the past three days.

      The mother of six and grandmother of nine, Betsy took to traffic control easily. Rather than call in a caterer, she’d summoned the collective resources of all of Julia’s friends. The women had brought over casseroles, pies, cakes and enough food to feed two armies.

      “You’ve got to eat something,” Betsy insisted. She paused to deliver the same entreaty every time their paths crossed within the crammed house filled with people who had loved Julia and Ted.

      And each time, Cate would respond the same way. “Maybe later.”

      Betsy would peer at her through her red-rimmed glasses. “All right, but I’ll be watching you.”

      Cate forced a smile to her lips. She tried to cheer herself up with the fact that her mother had been well loved by a great many people. Both her parents had been. And she was going to miss them terribly, but it was going to take her some time to get over the fact that they had deceived her. That they hadn’t had enough faith in her to know that she wasn’t about to pick up and go searching for her birth parents the moment she knew

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