Piece of My Heart (Under Suspicion #7) - Mary Higgins Clark Page 0,91

his choices, Roseanne loved him, and Bella would let him fly her in the air like an airplane, zooming in circles. The next second, though, they’d be gone, and he would realize how broken he was.

But then he got that shocking phone call from Michelle Carpenter. He rarely even thought of her all these years later. Maybe he had buried the memory of her, trying to bury his shame for having cheated on Roseanne, the love of his life. Until the motorcycle crash changed everything, his relationship with Michelle was the only real mistake he’d made in his marriage—and it was a terrible one. He met her in yoga class two days after Bella said her first full sentence. Me play, dada. She was a young toddler by then, but for some reason, those three little words made it real. He was daddy to a little independent person who would need him forever.

Was it the pressures of fatherhood that made him pursue Michelle? A need to prove that he was still attractive to a younger woman? He never meant for it to go on for months, or to lead to talk about a future and marriage and children. He had known he needed to break it off, but then she had been the one to end it. Nowadays, they’d call what she did “ghosting.” She simply disappeared. No return calls. No more yoga. And he certainly wasn’t going to pop into her workplace, given his wife’s regular presence there.

When she called him six months ago, she finally explained why she had cut him out of her life. She described how she had driven to his office to tell him the good news about the pregnancy, only to spot him with Roseanne, Bella, and his wedding band. Nearly eight years later, she contacted him out of the blue, after spending years as a drug addict. She swore up and down that she never told anyone the truth about the baby’s paternity—not even Daniel himself, as it turned out. It felt like she’d dropped a nuclear bomb on his world, so she could “find peace,” in her words.

Peace? Why did she deserve peace? Roseanne at least had a reason for taking his daughter away from him. His brain made him do things that scared her. But what Michelle had done was unforgiveable. His only crime was infidelity. He didn’t deserve to lose the right to know his son—to even know about his son—as punishment. “I need to see you in person,” he had pleaded. “To hear about his birth. You at least owe me that.”

Oh, in the end, she had found her peace all right. Thanks to the sedative he had slipped into her cranberry juice and club soda, she was sloppy and slurring as she rambled on about the nice Irish priest who found the perfect couple to steal his son. And then she flew high as a kite after he placed that needle in her arm. It hadn’t taken him long to make a mess out of her apartment. He knew from his brother that the cops would put two and two together: A former junkie, dead of an overdose. Case closed.

He hadn’t pumped the fatal dose of heroin into her vein until he had the information he needed. Even after he pulled out his gun and threatened to shoot her in the head, Michelle refused to tell him where the baby was. Instead, she had begged him to leave the child—his child—alone. “I swear to you, I would not have given him up unless I knew he was going to a good home. He’s a happy little boy. I see pictures on the mom’s Facebook page. He has two adorable little sisters—twins. His father’s a successful lawyer—his uncle just got named a federal judge. He’ll have every opportunity. Please, just let him have his life without the two of us to mess it up.”

She died trying to protect her son, but ended up giving Daniel what he knew would be enough information to identify the family. How many new federal judges could there be?

Now he patted Danny Junior on the top of his head. “Good job on the puzzle, buddy. Do you know what this place right here is?” He pointed to the District of Columbia.

“That’s Washington, D.C.,” Danny said.

“Is that where you live?”

He searched his son’s eyes as he mulled over the right answer.

“No, Daddy. That’s where that other family lives. I live here with you. Are we