Meant to Be Immortal (Argeneau #32) - Lynsay Sands Page 0,85

in the headspace to listen while they were alive,” she said regretfully. “I’m afraid finding out on my own as I did kind of rocked my world. I didn’t even notice that the checks were uncashed, just that there were checks. And I just—” she shrugged helplessly “—spun out. It felt like my whole world was crumbling. Mom and Dad weren’t my parents, their home wasn’t my home . . . Basically, I was a guest there that they were paid to feed and clothe and keep out of trouble. And they’d lied to me all those years, calling me their daughter and letting me call them Mom and Dad.” She shook her head.

“Of course I confronted them, and not delicately. I basically tore into them and demanded to know who my real parents were, which I know hurt them terribly, but Dad told me the story of him and his partner finding me. Only that just made things worse to my mind. Not only was I no longer their daughter, but I was some charity case they’d taken in. The garbage baby of a druggie runaway and some unknown man who might have been a john she’d sold herself to for drugs for all I knew. I imagined all sorts of horrible things,” she admitted sadly. “And I blamed them for it.”

Swallowing, she raised her head and peered up at the starry sky as she confessed, “I ran a little wild for a while, gave them a lot of trouble and attitude. They kept telling me they loved me, and nothing had changed—I was still their daughter and they wanted to adopt me and make it official—but I was so caught up in my own hurt and anger I wasn’t hearing them . . .” CJ paused briefly and then blew her breath out. “I was a mess, and I made their lives hell those last couple of months.”

“But eventually you came around and they adopted you,” Mac said, and she heard the hope in his voice. He wanted a happy ending for her. CJ was more than sorry to have to disabuse him.

“No,” she told him solemnly. “I mean, I did eventually come around and realize that they’d loved me, and had only not told me out of that love, but not in time for them to adopt me.” She saw his confusion, and explained, “Like I said, I was acting up. That included skipping school and staying out late and stupid tricks like that. One night when I was out past curfew, they got in the car and came out to look for me, and they were T-boned by a drunk driver. Mom died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. It was while sitting at Dad’s bedside in the hospital, praying for him to survive, that I got over my anger and hurt and realized that they both had loved me and I had repaid them like a spoiled little brat. But it was too late. My father died the second day.”

“And you went back into the foster system,” Mac surmised.

CJ nodded. “I was never really out of it, but yes, I went to a new foster home. The Millers. They were nice people too. They specialized in teenagers like myself. There were six of us there. Two boys and three other girls. We all got pretty close and I stayed there until I went off to university.”

“At seventeen,” Mac said, obviously remembering their previous conversation on the subject. “An impressive accomplishment.”

CJ shrugged. “As Mrs. Miller used to say, I was a girl with a mission,” she told him with a faint smile. “And she was right, I suppose. I was determined to prove to myself and everyone else that my parents, Marge and Johnathan Cummings, hadn’t wasted their time and love on me. I decided to be a police officer like my dad and started taking summer school every year to finish high school a year early, and then I did the same at university and got out of there with my degree early too. After that I was off to the Ontario Police College.”

She paused briefly, and then smiled crookedly and admitted, “I was the youngest cadet they’d accepted at the college and the only reason I got in so young was because I had the support of all of my father’s coworkers. Especially Uncle Ernie. Ernie Cowessess, my father’s partner,” she explained, and when he nodded, she continued, “He and Captain