Michael's Discovery - By Sherryl Woods Page 0,38
rueful grin.
“Tell me.”
“I understand why all of you would hesitate, but I think Maggie’s right. I’m sure every one of you has wondered all these years why your parents disappeared and left you behind. I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of impact that’s had on your lives.” She searched his face, trying to gauge how he was responding, but his expression was neutral. “Come on, Michael, isn’t it better to find out the truth and put it behind you, once and for all?”
“Then the answer’s pretty much black-and-white to you,” he concluded. “You think we should go and see if this Patrick is one of the twins?”
“Yes, I do.”
Michael’s expression turned thoughtful. “Think about this, though. He was barely two when everything happened. He might not even remember that he had brothers. He and Daniel and our parents might have had this tight-knit, perfectly happy family all these years. How’s he going to feel if three of us show up out of the blue and announce it was all a fraud?”
“It wasn’t a fraud,” Kelly replied. “It was simply his experience as a Devaney versus the ones each of you had.”
“But it could forever alter his trust in our parents. Do we have the right to do that?” He seemed genuinely tormented by the question.
“You know what I think? I think it’s amazing that you’re thinking of his feelings at all. That’s something a big brother would do. How can he not want to know that he has three older brothers who care deeply about him despite years and years of separation?”
Michael shook his head. “I think you’re being overly optimistic. I think he’s going to resent the hell out of us for coming in and destroying his world.”
“Then you’ll apologize and let him go on just as he has been.”
“You’re being naive, Kelly,” Michael accused her. “It doesn’t work that way. The damage will have been done.”
Kelly could see his point, but that was only one scenario. She pointed out another. “What if all these years, he has remembered having older brothers?” she asked. “What if he’s always felt as if a part of his life was missing? Are you ready to deny him the answers he needs to feel complete?”
Michael frowned at her questions. “If only we could predict which way it was going to go,” he said plaintively.
She put her hand over his and squeezed. “We can’t. We can only calculate the risks and make the best choice possible. No one should understand that better than you do. You’ve made a career out of taking calculated risks.”
“Yeah, but those are the kind of risks I understand,” he said.
“They’re life-and-death risks,” she countered.
“And this isn’t?” he asked wryly.
“Certainly not in the same way,” she insisted.
“Remind me to have this conversation with you again when your entire world’s been turned upside down,” he said.
Little did he know that it already had been…on the day he’d come back into her life.
Despite Kelly’s opinion that things would turn out all right, Michael was still feeling uneasy about this search for the rest of his biological family. On the one hand, it had turned out okay when Ryan and Sean had found him, but on the other, he sensed it was going to be very different with the twins.
As for finding his parents, he wasn’t even ready to go there yet. He was not as bitter toward them as Ryan and Sean obviously were. He simply didn’t care much one way or the other. That was a hornet’s nest he didn’t particularly want to disturb, but more and more it was growing inevitable that he would have to unless they called a halt to the search now. Whatever they did, they needed to be united, because all their lives were going to be affected. He honestly didn’t know which decision was the right one.
There was one person, though, whose opinion he trusted more than anyone else’s when it came to matters of family—his foster mother. Impulsively, the minute his therapy session ended and Kelly had gone, he called a cab and went over to the Havilceks. The fact that his mother would be in the midst of her Saturday baking wasn’t entirely coincidental.
It grated on him that he had to ask the cab driver to go up to the house and let his mother know to let him in through the garage, but the beaming smile on her face negated that momentary humiliation. She shivered as she waited for him