An Act of Persuasion - By Stephanie Doyle Page 0,29

Turns out Caroline Monroe had run away with a boyfriend and hadn’t been kidnapped at all.”

“That’s awful! All those years she was alive and wouldn’t let her parents know.”

Mark shook his head. “She wasn’t alive. A couple of months after she ran away she overdosed on whatever her drug of choice was. The boyfriend then promptly took off. Once I found him, I was able to track down the record of the Jane Doe who had been left at a hospital in Boston in a coma where she died a couple of days later.”

Anna slumped in her chair. “Her mother was right, then. She knew her daughter was dead. She just wanted to know how and where.”

“Parent intuition. Get ready for it. You’ll sprout some the minute the kid makes his or her arrival. Anyway, while I think the boyfriend was more than culpable at least in not calling for an ambulance when the girl was obviously in trouble, there are no real criminal charges that can be proven against him. His story is he came back to the motel room with food and she was out cold. He called the police anonymously from a pay phone.”

“Sounds too easy.”

“It does. But there’s no evidence to refute his claim so there’s no way for me to go after him. Anyway the Monroes will get to bury their daughter after all these years. So there is that.”

“Yeah, swell.” Anna thought about Mark’s words. Would she be blessed with parent intuition? Could a girl who hadn’t been given good parents actually become a better parent? Her mother, and even her father, had been looming large in her mind lately.

Actually, they’d taken up occupancy ever since Anna had decided she couldn’t stay with Ben any longer. When they had their fight over his decision to do the stem cell transplantation, she remembered what it had felt like to be left alone that day. A crowded room, people walking around her, bumping into her, but no one paying attention to her. Her mother missing.

In the dark days after she’d left Ben, while she waited to hear if he would live or die, she spent the time trying to recall details of that day her mother was gone so she could let the pain sink in deeper and take root, ensuring she wouldn’t forget. Like an immunization, she hoped the memory of losing her mother would serve to keep her protected from ever falling in love again. Because the pain of it, of not having that love reciprocated, had felt too heavy to bear. She’d decided then she wasn’t ever going to have her happily ever after like other people did.

Because she wasn’t other people. She was someone who had been left by her father. Left by her mother. And she’d done a very good job of causing enough strife in some of the foster homes where she’d lived to make them want to get rid of her, too.

Focusing on those memories wasn’t easy. They were vague at best. A six-year-old’s memory could hardly be trustworthy. She remembered the busy room. The people bumping into her as they walked by. She remembered the scalding fear she had when she could no longer see her mother. There hadn’t been any awareness of the separation happening. It was just suddenly her mother was there and then she was gone.

Vanished. And inherently Anna knew from that moment on she was alone. Eventually a woman in a dark blue uniform had knelt in front of her to ask her what her name was. Anna had been wearing a pair of jeans, sneakers with holes in the toes and a Disney princess T-shirt.

She wanted to remember if she’d said anything to her mother. If her mother had said anything to her. But Anna didn’t. She didn’t remember her even saying goodbye.

Anna wished she could go back and tell that woman her abandonment was going to really screw Anna over.

Not just because she would be put into the foster-care system, but because by leaving, her mother was going to turn Anna into someone else. Someone who didn’t trust people. Someone who didn’t need people. Someone who didn’t put up a fight for the people she loved.

Ben had been the only person in her life to crack through that well-constructed wall of caution. And when she considered it, how messed up was that? The man was an emotional ice block. Maybe she’d subconsciously chosen to love him out of all other people because