Reed looked troubled as he listened to what the caller on the other end of the line was saying. His dick was still throbbing under me through his pants. I was still on cloud nine, despite the seemingly urgent nature of his phone call.
My heart started to pound rapidly once I began to really sense that something was wrong.
“What’s going on?” I interrupted.
He held his index finger up as he continued to concentrate hard on the information he was being given.
“You need to email me all of this information as soon as possible.” He paused. “Alright. Good work, Josh. Thank you.”
He tossed his phone aside and ran his fingers through his hair. “Get dressed, Charlotte. We need to talk.”
“What’s happening?”
Reed was flustered. “Please. Just get dressed.”
“Okay.”
After I put my clothes back on, he said, “I have to tell you something, and it’s going to upset you. But I want you to know I had the best of intentions.”
“Alright . . .”
“Charlotte, no matter what happens between us, I consider you one of the most important people in my life. I want you to have closure and peace when it comes to where you came from. I wanted to help you find your birth parents. I knew that if it were left up to you alone, it might take you years, if ever, to find them. I have a private investigator at my disposal, and I put him on the case full-time.”
“Oh my God. You what?”
“Josh has been on it for several weeks. He’s spent an extensive amount of time in both Poughkeepsie and Houston.”
“Houston?”
“Yes.”
“What did he find?”
“It seems that a week before you were born, there was a girl who gave birth to a baby that was never assigned a social security number. The teenage girl left the hospital before she applied for it. Josh got ahold of the girl’s medical intake form. She’d given a bogus name for herself, but she’d listed her nearest relative as a Brad Spears, and that name checked out. He located Brad, who told him the real name of his friend who had disappeared years earlier. Her name is Lydia Van der Kamp. She was from Texas and had apparently been hiding her pregnancy from her parents.”
My heartbeat began to accelerate. “Lydia is my mother?”
Reed nodded. “It looks like it. This guy Brad and Lydia were pen pals when she ran away from her religious family and came to New York. He wasn’t the baby’s father, but Brad had a thing for her. The plan was that she’d stay, have the baby, and then they’d run away together. That’s the part where things get a little fuzzy. For some reason, Lydia had a change of heart. She disappeared from the hospital and took the baby without telling Brad, and that’s as much as he knows. Shortly after, you were discovered at the church. Josh located a Lydia Van der Kamp in Houston. She was the only person with that name in the area. Around that time, you told me you were found wearing an Astros blanket. That corroborated the Texas connection.”
I covered my mouth. “Oh my God.”
“Since then, Josh has been in Texas and has spoken to Lydia’s children.”
“Children?”
I have siblings?
Reed half smiled. “Yeah. She has two sons. They confirmed that their mother recently confessed that she’d abandoned a child in a New York church as a teenager. We don’t have a blood test to confirm anything, but I think it’s safe to say we found your mother.”
I wanted to know what she looked like. “Do you have a photo of her?”
“No, unfortunately, I don’t. But I can get that for you.”
Nodding my head repeatedly to absorb all of this, I said, “Okay . . .”
I got the sense that he was hesitant to tell me something else.
“Is there more?”
Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes. “She’s dying, Charlotte.”
My heart felt like it was disintegrating. “What?”
“That phone call I just received brought some unsettling news. Apparently Lydia has been suffering from complications of Crohn’s disease, which hit her very hard and young. She got something called sclerosing cholangitis, which resulted in liver failure. She’s on life support at the moment and is not expected to survive.”
My mother is dying? She’s so young.
“Oh my God. What does this mean?”
He paused. “It means you and I are heading to Texas.”
