The Secret Sin
Annie couldn’t imagine her presence would help put Lindsey at ease. The opposite might be true. “Won’t you be there when the doctor examines her?”
“Well, yes,” the nurse said.
“Then I’ll wait here.”
“Very well.” The nurse’s slow acceptance of her decision made Annie wonder if she’d made the wrong choice. “I’ll come get you when the doctor’s done. You’ll want to hear what he has to say.”
Edie gazed at her curiously as the nurse took her leave, no doubt wondering why she hadn’t gone with Lindsey. Annie remembered that Edie and her high-school friends had been nicknamed the Gossip Girls long before the TV show became popular.
“Lindsey and I aren’t related.” Annie decided it would be better to tell Edie the truth than have her spread rumors. “She’s a friend of the family.”
“I thought she might be a stepdaughter, but I was pretty sure you weren’t married,” Edie said. “Didn’t I hear something about you taking over your father’s rafting business?”
“Not true,” Annie said, although the misconception was a common one. Some people in town already had her as the new owner. “I’m still a magazine writer. My boss let me take the summer off so I can run the business for my father while he’s out of the country.”
“He’s in Poland, right?” Edie asked.
“Right,” Annie said.
One of the twin boys barreled over to Edie, stopped dead in front of her and pointed to his face. Edie dug a tissue out of her purse and wordlessly swiped at the little boy’s runny nose.
Annie picked up a magazine on fly fishing and flipped it open. Edie’s son rejoined his brother, plopping down on the floor in front of a fort they were constructing from plastic building blocks.
Edie ignored the hint that Annie wasn’t up for any more conversation. “You do know Ryan Whitmore’s back in town, right?”
Annie hid a grimace, afraid that Edie and her friends had guessed how Annie felt about him in high school. Why else would Edie bring him up? She composed herself and looked up from the magazine. “Why do you ask?”
Bonnie Raitt started to sing suddenly, her powerful voice cutting off whatever response Edie had been about to give. Annie fished her cell phone from the deep pocket of her shorts, muted the ring tone and checked the display. Her father’s number displayed on the small screen.
“Excuse me.” She stood up, grateful for an excuse to get away from Edie. She headed for the exit and privacy, waiting until she was outside on the sidewalk to press the receive button. The door of a gift shop next door was slowly swinging shut behind a customer, and she caught the sweet smell of scented candles.
“Hello, Dad.” She headed up the hill from the pediatrician’s office, away from a group of window-shopping tourists. As the hour neared five o’clock, the traffic on the street had thickened, the number of cars seemingly out of place on the too narrow quaint street. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“I didn’t have my phone with me.” Her father’s voice was scratchy and hard to make out, but it was still wonderful to hear from him. After her mother deserted them when Annie was four years old, they’d grown exceptionally close. “Is something wrong?”
“Not really.” She got straight to the point. “I called to ask you about Lindsey Thompson.”
Interference in the connection combined with the incidental street noise made it difficult to tell whether her father had responded.
“Dad?” Annie prompted. “Are you still there?”
“What about Lindsey Thompson?” His voice sounded odd, but that could have been due to the poor reception.
“She phoned from the train station to say she’d come to visit you. She said she knows you through Joe Nowak.”
There was a long pause before he said, “That’s true.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me Helene Nowak had a daughter?” Annie asked. “I’m positive you didn’t mention it when she died.”
“I didn’t.” The strange vibe remained in his voice. “Where is Lindsey now?”
“Here in Indigo Springs. With me. There were no trains back to Pittsburgh today so now I’m wondering what to do with a fifteen-year-old.”
“Lindsey told you she was fifteen?”
“Isn’t she?”
“She’s thirteen,” her father said.
Thirteen.
The unlucky number flashed in Annie’s mind like a neon warning sign. And just like that, she knew.
Her muscles clenched and her stomach muscles tightened against the blow that was coming. It was the only way the events of the past few hours made sense.
“Who is Lindsey Thompson, Dad?” she prompted, her voice already trembling.
“I didn’t want you to find out this way.”
She suppressed an urge to toss the cell phone into the street, where the tires of a passing car would smash it. She took a deep breath and smelled exhaust fumes. She forced her vocal chords into action. “Want me to find out what?”
“She’s your daughter.”
Annie sank onto the nearest stoop. The traffic continued to pass by while across the street a bell jingled as customers went in and out of an ice-cream shop, the scene the same as it had been moments before.
But for Annie, everything had changed with three world-shattering words.
“There you are.” Edie Clark appeared as though she’d materialized out of thin air. “I told the receptionist I’d come out and get you.”
“Annie?” Her father’s voice came over the phone, urgent and worried. “Are you okay?”
She wasn’t okay. She’d just discovered the father she’d trusted had let friends adopt her baby, expressly going against her wishes that he arrange a closed adoption. And one of the biggest gossips in Indigo Springs was regarding her with open curiosity. “I can’t talk now, Dad. I’ll call you back later.”
Annie disconnected the call and summoned the will to stand up, determined to appear normal.
“Sorry to interrupt your call,” Edie said brightly, “but Ryan’s waiting.”
She must have misspoken. Annie had gone to the pediatrician specifically to avoid dealing with Ryan Whitmore. “You mean the pediatrician is waiting?”
“Oh, no. That’s why I asked you about Ryan earlier. His office closes early on Fridays.” Edie indicated the placard on the door behind Annie, and she realized they were in front of Whitmore Family Practice. The office hours that were listed confirmed the office was indeed closed. “Dr. Goldstein had a family emergency, so Ryan’s taking his patients this afternoon.”
Somehow Annie managed to nod, although her entire body felt numb. She concentrated on placing one foot in front of the other as she followed Edie to the pediatrician’s office, bracing herself for the ordeal to come.
But how could she possibly prepare to talk to Ryan Whitmore when the girl they’d conceived when they were both only sixteen had inexplicably resurfaced?
CHAPTER TWO
R YAN W HITMORE leaned one shoulder against the bright-blue wall outside the examination room, making a notation on young Lindsey Thompson’s chart.
A pint-sized girl with a mop of dark curls stuck her head around a door frame down the hall from where he stood. She was about four years old. He waved. She giggled, her head disappearing back into the room.
As soon as he talked in private to whomever had brought in Lindsey, it would be the little girl’s turn.
The nurse who’d been assisting him came back, walking down the hall with another woman trailing her. Ryan blinked once, then twice, but his eyes weren’t wrong.
It didn’t matter that the nurse partially obscured his view and a baseball-style cap covered the second woman’s hair. He would have recognized her from a hundred feet away, which was about as close as he’d come to her since they were teenagers.
“Dr. Whitmore, this is the woman who brought in Lindsey,” the nurse said when they reached him. “Annie—?”
“Sublinski,” he finished, keeping his eyes trained on Annie, who had yet to meet his gaze. “We went to high school together.”
“Then you don’t need me,” the nurse said cheerfully. She excused herself as though the chance meeting was nothing out of the ordinary.
She couldn’t know he and Annie Sublinski had last spoken more than thirteen years ago on the telephone about giving up the baby she was carrying.
The nurse couldn’t possibly be aware of all the things Ryan had never said to Annie, or the guilt that never quite went away no matter how much he tried to live in the moment.
He shook off the memories and focused on the present.
“This is a surprise,” he said.
She raised her eyes. The color was an unremarkable mixture of brown and green. He was at a loss as to why he’d always found them so fascinating.
She’d been appealing as a teen but was even more so now that she was nearly thirty. Her bare arms and legs were toned and tanned, and she had a natural, clear-skinned look that could put a cosmetic company out of business—if not for her port-wine stain. He wondered why she’d never had it removed.
“For me, too.” Her eyes were guarded, as though she’d noticed him assessing her birthmark. He hoped she hadn’t. “A surprise, I mean. I didn’t know you were filling in for Dr. Goldstein.”
She clearly wouldn’t have brought Lindsey to the pediatrician’s office if she had. A few years back, while he was visiting family over Christmas, he’d spotted Annie coming out of Abe’s General Store. The downtown had been decorated with wreaths and festive lights, the perfect setting for an apology. Annie had spotted him coming and promptly crossed the street, rushing through the snowflakes drifting from the sky before disappearing into her pickup.
“About Lindsey.” She held herself stiffly, like a cornered animal ready to take flight. “Do you know what’s wrong with her?”
Now obviously was not the time to bring up the past.
“We can talk in there.” He nodded toward his colleague’s office. She hesitated, then complied, not looking at him as she passed. He followed her into the room, closing the door with a soft thud.
She winced at the noise, edged backward and crossed her arms over her chest. Her weight shifted from foot to foot.
Pretending her body language didn’t bother him, he hoisted himself up on the edge of the desk that dominated the room. “There’s nothing wrong with Lindsey a glass of orange juice and a sandwich won’t cure.”
“Excuse me?”
He tapped the girl’s file against his palm. “Her blood sugar was low. The last time she ate was this morning, and all she had was yogurt.”
“That’s all that was wrong with her?”
“Like a lot of teenage girls, she has some skewed ideas about how much she should weigh,” he said. “We gave her some juice and a granola bar one of the nurses had left over from lunch, but she could use a good meal.”
“I should have asked if she’d eaten.” Annie seemed to be talking to herself as much as him. “At the train station, I should have asked her.”
“The train station?” he repeated.
She nodded. “In Paoli. I picked her up an hour or so ago.”
“Who is she?”
Her eyes shifted, which they’d been doing a lot. “A friend of the family.”
That didn’t compute. Whoever had filled out the forms, and he had to assume that was Annie, hadn’t even known the names of Lindsey’s parents.
“I don’t know much about her,” she answered as though she’d read his mind. “I didn’t even know she was coming. She’s here to visit my father. Her grandfather’s a friend of his.”
That didn’t make sense, either. “Didn’t I hear that your father is in Poland?”
“Lindsey didn’t know that.”
“Shouldn’t her parents have known?”
Annie looked away again, heightening his sense that she was hiding something. “I don’t think they know she’s here.”
“Have you called them?”
She seemed to be clenching her teeth. “Kind of tough to do without a phone number.”
So that’s what Annie was concealing. Now that she’d admitted she didn’t have a home phone number for Lindsey, it was easy to piece together what had happened today.
Lindsey had gotten on a train without telling her parents she was leaving, which just might qualify as running away from home. He thought about the little girl who’d waved at him from the room down the hall. She was going to have to wait a little longer for the doctor to arrive.
“Let’s go see Lindsey.” He hopped down from the desk, yanked open the door, then let Annie precede him. There wasn’t much space between him and the door, but she managed to squeeze through without touching him. He caught a whiff of her clean, outdoorsy scent, and he was transported back years, to the single night they’d spent together.
“Second door on the right,” he told her, his mind thick with memories. How could that night, which had been so special, have had such shattering repercussions?
She hung back, wordlessly indicating he should enter the room ahead of her. He wasn’t as careful to avoid contact as she had been, inadvertently brushing her arm as he passed. She jerked sideways as though pricked by a porcupine.
Damn. He’d found it charming that she’d been flustered around him when they were in high school, but this was a new reaction altogether. She was nervous—and not in a good way.
The hell of it was that he couldn’t talk to her about it. Not now. As a doctor, his primary responsibility was to his patient. He had a more pressing matter to deal with than his regrets over the past.
His priorities back in order, he strode through the door to find that Lindsey had moved from the exam table to a chair in the corner of the room. Her color was better, but he read apprehension on her face when she saw Annie following him. What was that about? he wondered.
He smiled at her, an easy task. Lindsey was trying her hardest to act grown-up, but underneath her brave front was a rather charming child. “How’s that orange juice going down?”
“I’d rather have a Diet Coke.” Her quick comeback and smile reminded him of somebody he couldn’t quite place.
“Juice is a better choice,” Annie said.
Lindsey’s smile faded, her hand tightening on the half-full glass. “I like Diet Coke.”
“Annie has a point, Lindsey,” Ryan interjected. “You need nutrients to build up your blood sugar, and diet soda won’t cut it.”
He didn’t give Lindsey an opening to respond, pulling a piece of paper from her file and extending it to her. “I need some information for our records before I can release you.”
With obvious reluctance, she took the form and the pen he handed her along with it.
“I realize you don’t know your insurance information,” he added, “but it would help if you filled out what you can.”
Lindsey nodded before turning her attention to the form, her brow knitting in concentration as she wrote. Annie stood like a statue just inside the door, keeping as far away from him as possible.
Her low opinion of him smarted, although he didn’t blame her. He should have made his peace with her years before now. He could use the excuse that getting through med school and his residency had required total concentration and dedication, but that’s all it was: an excuse.
Within moments, Lindsey handed the pen and paper back to him. A quick glance at the form confirmed he’d achieved his objective: The girl had written down her phone number.
“So, can we go?” Lindsey asked.
“As long as you promise to eat something,” Ryan said.
Lindsey stood up, although her jeans were so tight he questioned how she could move. She held up the granola bar, from which she’d taken maybe two bites. “I’m already eating something.”
“Something more than a granola bar,” Ryan clarified.
“I’ll see to it that she has a meal,” Annie said.
Lindsey slanted her a dubious look. He wondered if Annie had any experience dealing with teenagers, but then he speculated about a lot where Annie was concerned.
Like whether she’d ever forgive him for that night.
“Bye, Dr. Whitmore,” Lindsey said.
“Bye, Lindsey.”
The girl strolled out of the examination room. Before Annie could follow, Ryan caught her arm in a gentle grip. She inhaled sharply.
“Let me go.” Her voice was an urgent whisper.
Stung, he did as she asked. “I was just going to give you Lindsey’s home phone number.”
She pursed her lips, mumbling, “Sorry.” She fumbled in the pocket of her shorts, withdrawing her cell phone. “What is it?”
He read off the ten digits, which she entered, never once glancing up at him. “Thank you,” she said.
“You’re welcome.”
She started walking away from him, rebuilding the distance she’d kept between them all these years. “Annie?”
He thought she’d pretend she hadn’t heard him and keep on walking, but then she turned. “Yes?”
“It was good to finally talk to you again.”
He supposed it was too much to hope that she’d echo the sentiment. She nodded once, then pivoted, as though eager to get away from him.
He didn’t stop her retreat. Not this time. But now that she was back in his life, he wouldn’t let her walk out of it again until he said his long-overdue piece.
A NNIE had never held the baby she delivered.
After a lengthy, tough labor, she’d heard a lusty cry and felt like weeping herself. The nurse had brought the infant close enough for Annie to see her, but she’d only gotten a brief look.
She’d been awed that she had helped create someone so tiny and perfect, but she’d tried to pay attention to the baby’s red, wrinkled skin. Anything to take her mind off the enormity of what she was giving up.
Even though her heart was aching, she hadn’t protested when the nurse claimed it was best for the separation to be immediate. From her experience with her own mother, who’d popped in and out of her life before finally disappearing for good, Annie knew the nurse was right.
The nurse had whisked the baby away, and Annie had fully expected never to see her again.
“You’re staring at me,” Lindsey accused.
Annie blinked, and the snack counter at the back of Abe’s General Store came into focus. They were sitting on red vinyl stools, their reflections bouncing back at them from the stainless steel of the old-fashioned soda machine. She smelled grease from the grill and the hot dogs on the rotating rack.
Annie had been taking a mental snapshot of Lindsey that she could call to mind in the years to come. It wouldn’t be difficult. The shape of Lindsey’s face, the spacing of her eyes, the arch of her eyebrows and the even whiteness of her smile were all reminiscent of Ryan.
Ryan, who brought out the nervous, insecure teenager in her that she’d desperately wanted to believe was gone forever.
She fought the feeling that she’d been unfair in not revealing who Lindsey was. It was better this way. If Ryan never knew Lindsey was the baby they’d given up for adoption, he wouldn’t have to lose her all over again.
The way Annie was going to.
“I can’t eat when you’re looking at me like that,” Lindsey complained.
They’d swung by the snack counter after leaving the pediatrician’s office. Annie had given Lindsey a ten-dollar bill, then stepped outside to phone the girl’s parents, nervously wondering whether they’d recognize her as Lindsey’s birth mother. The call had gone straight to voice mail.
“I’m sorry,” Annie said. “I didn’t realize I was staring.”
“Well, you were.” Lindsey set her nibbled-on sandwich back down on her bare plate.
Annie worried that the girl should have ordered something more substantial than turkey on rye bread and a Diet Coke. If the woman who’d prepared the food hadn’t left the counter, Annie would ask her to throw in potato salad or at least a bag of chips.
“You should finish that.” Annie nodded at the sandwich.
“It’s not very good.”
Of course it wasn’t. It contained no cheese, no pickle, no lettuce, no tomato and probably no condiments. Annie pursed her lips, unsure of what to do or say next. Uncertain how to get a teenager to do anything at all.
“Dr. Whitmore would tell you to eat your food,” Annie said, dismayed that she’d resorted to using his name.
Lindsey’s mouth twisted, but she picked up her sandwich and took a bite.
Was there already an invisible connection between Ryan and Lindsey? Is that how he’d succeeded in getting the girl’s phone number when Annie had failed?
How would he react if he knew the truth? Surely he’d noticed how edgy Annie was, so why hadn’t he guessed? A reason occurred to her.
“How old did you tell Dr. Whitmore you were?” she asked.
Lindsey didn’t look up from her food. “Fifteen.”
Now that Annie knew the truth, it was easy to see through the lie. “Is fifteen how old you need to be to travel alone on the train?”
“I don’t know,” Lindsey mumbled.
“I think you do know,” Annie said. “That’s why you said you were fifteen when you’re only thirteen.”
Lindsey’s head jerked up. “How do you know I’m thirteen?”
“My father told me.”
Lindsey swiped strands of her long hair out of her face and sat up straighter, an eager light in her eyes. “Is Uncle Frank back? Did you ask him if I could stay?”
Annie’s fingers clenched into fists. How could her father not have told her about Lindsey? She’d confided in him when she got pregnant and trusted him to handle the adoption arrangements. Her faith in him had been so absolute that she’d signed the papers severing her parental rights without reading them. She’d never dreamed he’d give her baby to someone Annie might possibly know.
“I talked to him on the phone,” Annie said. “He’ll be in Poland for at least another month.”
Lindsey’s head dropped again. “What else did he tell you about me?”
“Not much,” Annie said. If she was alone, she’d call her father back and demand answers, the six-hour time difference be damned. “I don’t even know what grade you’re in.”
Or if Lindsey knew she was adopted.
“I’ll be in eighth grade in September,” Lindsey said. “I’m almost fourteen, you know.”
Her birth date was in mid-March, which meant Lindsey wasn’t yet thirteen and a half. She wondered if Lindsey had written down her true birthday on the medical form or whether she’d tried to preserve the fiction that she was fifteen.
She also wondered how closely Ryan had looked at the form.
“And you live in Pittsburgh?” Annie asked.
“Not in Pittsburgh exactly,” Lindsey said. “We live in Fox Chapel. It’s near Pittsburgh.”
“Any brothers or sisters?”
Lindsey narrowed her eyes. “Are you going to ask my phone number next?”
Annie had been attempting to fill a desperate need to find out more about Lindsey, but that wasn’t what the girl had asked. “I already called your parents.”
“But…but how did you get the number?”
“The form in Dr. Whitmore’s office.”
From the shocked expression on Lindsey’s face, she hadn’t considered that possibility.
“I left your parents a message,” Annie continued. “They’re probably worried sick about you.”
“They don’t even know I’m gone,” Lindsey said. “Dad took Timmy and Teddy to Kennywood, and Gretchel’s working. She’s supposed to pick me up at a friend’s house at five o’clock.”
Kennywood, Annie knew, was a popular amusement park near Pittsburgh that was one of the oldest in the nation. “Who’s Gretchel?”
“My stepmother.”
“Are Timmy and Teddy your brothers?” Annie asked.
“Sort of,” Lindsey said. “I’m adopted. They’re not.”
Annie bit her lower lip to find it trembling. Lindsey had been matter-of-fact in stating she was adopted, but she considered Annie’s father to be her uncle and not her grandfather. Lindsey obviously didn’t know the truth about her birth, and it wasn’t Annie’s place to tell her.
“That doesn’t make them any less your brothers,” Annie said.
Lindsey blew air out her nose, but stayed quiet. Neither did it seem as though she planned to eat any more of her sandwich. Yet she needed nourishment. She was too thin and still pale enough that she looked as though she might topple off the stool.