Anything for Her - By Janice Kay Johnson Page 0,71

probably not beyond my abilities,” Nolan said drily. “If I fail, you can be my backup.”

“Maybe she looked dorky in high school. She might have had zits all over her face, or dyed her hair blond or had a whole bunch of piercings.”

Nolan finally did laugh. “In which case, I won’t recognize her.”

Sean pondered for another minute. “I bet Allie never had zits.”

“I bet not, too.”

When they got home, Nolan did not rush straight to his computer. He would be happiest if Sean didn’t know how serious he was about this search. The kid kept popping out of his room to ask questions for his research paper and then to tell Nolan this cool thing that had happened today and that sucky one. At long last, he disappeared and stayed disappeared.

Nolan went online.

It took some doing, but damned if Sean wasn’t right. It appeared that many if not most high schools now put the yearbooks up on the internet. What’s more, they were apparently going back and putting the old ones up, too. If Nolan wanted, he could probably hunt for his parents’.

As it happened, he’d seen their yearbooks. Those photos had cemented his awareness that he did not in any way resemble the man he had always called Dad. Once he’d known the truth, he’d felt dumb for not suspecting sooner.

Shaking off thoughts about his lying parents, he zeroed in on Fairfield High School, Oklahoma—the computer seemed determined to divert him to a high school with the same name in another state.

Allie had moved at the beginning of her senior year, she’d said. Probably before photos were taken. He found the year before she’d moved, although he could conceivably be a year off, depending on whether she was almost twenty-nine or barely twenty-eight. The search by name brought up one student with the last name of Wright—a boy named James. He took a careful look, but the kid was skinny, blond and had a big nose. Not Allie’s brother—and hadn’t she said he was older than her, anyway? He’d presumably already graduated the year she was a junior.

Grimly determined, Nolan scrolled through the freshmen. Despite his mood, he found it briefly entertaining, since Sean was that age. The prettiest girls were trying so hard to look sophisticated, the rest of the girls were clearly wishing to be anywhere at all but in front of the camera, and the boys might as well have been eight-year-olds who’d grown strangely tall. Except for one—a guy with serious shoulders who was probably already shaving and could have been eighteen. Maybe he’d been held back a year. Or not. Nolan had had a classmate like that. He got all the girls until the rest of the boys starting catching up, maturity-wise, their junior and senior years. Nolan smiled reminiscently. He’d been pretty damn happy when he started needing to shave—and when he’d realized he was as tall as Mitch Judson.

Sophomores were noticeably more relaxed. Even the girls who weren’t the prettiest were using makeup with more confidence, relaxing into who they were. Allie’s face was not among them.

He was feeling some reluctance by the time he started in on the juniors. Was he really so set on confirming that she’d lied to him? And he already knew there was no Allie Wright among the students pictured in this yearbook. He was being stubborn, that’s all, not wanting to admit she’d really do that to him.

That he meant so little to her.

Halfway through, he was only glancing from face to face. He’d lost interest in reflecting on his own high school years, or how Sean would change so much over the next two years. He felt a little sick. Could he possibly have been so wrong about Allie?

His gaze stopped on some poor kid with the unenviable last name of Parfomchuk. Bet he’d spend his whole life having to spell his name.

But that wasn’t what had stopped Nolan. Going back, his eye reluctantly passed over several faces—Opgaard, Oliver, Oakes, Numley, Neumiller...Nelson.

Stunned, he found himself looking at a very young and pretty Allie Wright—whose name, according to the yearbook, had been Laura Nelson.

He closed his eyes then opened them again. Yep. It was still undeniably her. Different, of course; at sixteen, she’d been astonishingly beautiful, and yet unlike most of the other girls she wasn’t smiling. Her expression was...shy, maybe, but also grave.

He imagined her walking through the halls of the high school with that untouchable air. Pretty as a fairy princess, but he still