hypotheticals were totally different from the Earlys who had adopted her. She convinced herself that living in her real parents’ home would have been one long birthday party with balloons and cake and presents every day and all night. No more cold, drafty house with too many rooms. No more stiff, formal dinners in the dining room. No more sense that she was a nuisance, unwelcome in spite of the fact that her entering Mr. and Mrs. Early’s lives had been a willful, deliberate act on their part.
But yes, the stolen-princess narrative had been one she’d spun as a youngster, her true, virtuous parents out there somewhere in the world, swindled out of their rightful place in her life, mourning her loss as they fruitlessly searched for her.
She had waited for a rescue for so many years. So many. But now that she was an adult? She knew that there was no castle waiting for her on top of a mountain. No “real” parents still searching for her. No one that truly cared, one way or the other, about her future.
Which was why she had to be the hero in her own life.
“Jo? You still there?”
Shaking herself back into focus, she cleared her throat. “Sorry. I’m just . . . yes, I’m here.”
“I know this is awkward.”
“No, it’s not. What happened to you and Lydia is painful and very sad, and even though we haven’t known each other for very long, you’ve both been great friends to me.” Actually, they were her only friends at the moment, so there was that. “I just wish there was something, anything, I could do for you and her. But I can’t, and I hate this feeling that I’m failing you. And then there’s the suckage that you’re good people and this shouldn’t happen to good people.”
Bill’s voice got hoarse. “Thanks, Jo.”
“I won’t say you’re welcome because I wish I didn’t have to say it at all.”
“Amen.”
They talked for a little bit longer, and then they ended the call. Bill was going to take the rest of the week off as personal time, and that was the right thing to do. And when he came back? Jo told him she was ready to co-author everything she was working on.
Putting her phone down, she stared at the door. And thought about how she had made love to a stranger right where she was currently sitting just a half hour before.
Funny how losses were as much of a currency as happiness in life. Somehow, they were noticed more, though.
Jo got to her feet and went back into the kitchen. In a drawer by the refrigerator, one that might have held cutlery if she had any, she kept a manila folder she hadn’t gone into since she’d moved in.
There had been so much going on. And she hadn’t been feeling well. And—
Well, she just hadn’t had the energy to deal with one more thing.
But she took the folder out now, and unsheathed the glossy photograph of a man with dark hair and dark eyes. Turning the image over, she read the block printing that had been done in Sharpie.
DR. MANUEL MANELLO, CHIEF OF SURGERY. ST. FRANCIS MEDICAL CENTER.
Bill had given her the picture. And had typed up a report on what he’d found when he’d looked into her birth mother, who had died during birth.
It was a mystery solved. Kind of. And the dark-haired man? He was her brother . . . who had strangely disappeared off the radar over eighteen months before.
Never to be seen or heard from again.
“I’m getting really sick and tired of people who disappear into thin air,” she muttered to herself.
Even though Butch was a tried-and-true Red Sox fan, he was mature enough to appreciate that there were certain things that came out of the enemy’s home state that were not all bad. Not that he was in a big hurry to admit this, even to himself—and yet, as the sun came up, he reflected how much difference a good USDA Prime New York strip steak could make in a man’s life. Just the ticket.
On that note, he leaned even further back in the French settee, and repositioned the piece of meat on his black eye. As he let out a groan of relief, someone sat down next to him.
“I’m sorry I had to do that, cop.”
Butch opened the lid that worked and looked at V. “S’okay. I woulda done the same thing.”
“How’s your head?”
“What’s that old expression? Kicking like a mule?”