Bloodfever

“And your hair?”

“You don’t like it?” It was hard to feign surprise when I hated it myself; I missed the weight of it, the different styles I’d been able to wear, the swish of it when I walked. I was just grateful he hadn’t seen me when I’d still had all my splints on.

He gave me a look. “You are kidding, right? Mac, baby, you had beautiful hair, long and blond like your mother’s…” He trailed off.

And there it was. I looked him dead in the eye. “Which mother, Dad? Mom? Or the other one—you know, the one that gave me up for adoption?”

“You want to go get some dinner, Mac?”

Men. Do they all evade as first line of defense?

We ordered delivery. I hadn’t had a good pizza in forever, it was starting to rain again, and I was in no mood to go out in it. I ordered, Dad paid, just like old times when life was simple, and Daddy was always there to be my Friday night date whenever my latest boyfriend had been a jerk. I gathered paper plates and napkins from Fiona’s stash behind the register. Before sitting down with our pizza, I turned on all the exterior lights, and lit a cozy gas fire. For now, we were safe. I just had to keep him safe until morning, when I would somehow get him on a plane and send him home.

I keep a happy thought inside me at all times. I cling to it in my darkest moments: When all this is over, I’m going to go back to Ashford and pretend none of this happened. I’m going to find myself a man, get married, and have babies. I need both my parents at home, waiting for me because I’m going to make little Lane girls, and we’re going to be a family again.

We kept the talk light through dinner. He told me that Mom was still lost in grief and not talking to anyone. He’d hated leaving her, but he’d taken her to Gram and Gramp’s and they were giving her the best of care. Thinking about Mom was too painful, so I turned the conversation to books. Dad loves to read as much as I do, and I knew that in his opinion there were far worse places he could have found me working, like another bar. We talked about new releases. I told him some of my plans for the store.

When dinner was over we pushed our plates back and regarded each other warily.

He began a somber “You know your mother and I love you” spiel, and I hushed him. I knew. I didn’t have any doubts on that score. I’d been forced to come to terms with so much in the past few weeks that making peace with my discovery that my parents were not my birth parents hadn’t taken as long as I’d expected. It had rocked my world, brutally shifted my paradigm, but regardless of whose sperm and egg had resulted in my conception, Jack and Rainey Lane had raised me with more love and unwavering support than most people ever know in a lifetime. If my biological parents were alive out there somewhere, they were my second set.

“I know, Dad. Just tell me.”

“How did you find out, Mac?”

I told him an old woman had insisted I was someone else, about brown eyes and blue not making green, about calling the hospital to check on my birth records.

“We knew this day might come.” He pushed a hand through his hair and sighed. “What do you want to know, Mac?”

“Everything,” I said in a low voice. “Every last detail.”

“It’s not much.”

“Alina was my biological sister, wasn’t she?”

He nodded. “She was almost three, and you were nearly a year when the two of you came to us.”

“Where did we come from, Dad?”

“They didn’t tell us. In fact, they told us virtually nothing while demanding everything.”

“They” were people from a church in Atlanta. Mom and Dad couldn’t conceive, and had been on an adoption waiting list for so long they’d nearly given up. But one day they got a call that two children had been left at a downtown church, and a friend of a friend of the church’s pastor’s sister knew their counselor, who’d suggested the Lanes. Not all couples were willing to accept, or had the financial means to take on two young children at once, and among the biological mother’s lengthy list of requirements was that the children not be separated. She’d also insisted that if the adoptive couple did not already live in a rural area, they must move to a small town and agree to never live in or near a city again.

“Why?”

“We were told it was what it was, Mac, and we could take it or leave it.”

“And you didn’t think it was odd?”

“Of course we did. Extremely. But your mother and I wanted so badly to have children and couldn’t. We were young and in love and would have done just about anything to have a family of our own. Since both of us came from small towns to begin with, we took it as a sign to return to our roots. We visited dozens of towns, finally settling on Ashford. I was a successful attorney and pulled every string I could to push the adoption through. We signed all the documents, including the list of requirements, and in no time, we were proud parents living in a great little town where everyone believed you were our biological daughters, leading the life we’d always dreamed of.” He smiled, reminiscing. “We fell in love with you girls the moment we saw you. Alina was wearing this yellow skirt and sweater set, and you were dressed from head to toe in pink, Mac, with a little rainbow ribbon tied around a blond wisp of your hair.”