Kyle was sitting at the kitchen table typing away on his laptop when Natalie got home from meeting with Brooke. He looked up when she walked in the room and lifted his fingers off the keyboard. “How’d it go?” he asked. Despite his obvious reservations about the situation—even after Natalie had explained that Zora had been lying about Brooke being a hooker—he hadn’t tried to keep Natalie from going to meet Brooke. The only thing he said as she was about walk out the door was “Be careful,” and reminding herself that he had her best interests in mind, she promised him that she would.
“Where are the kids?” she replied as she set her purse on the counter, then sat down at the table across from her husband. Both Hailey and Henry almost always came running when Natalie returned from being out; the fact that they hadn’t, now, made it clear they weren’t in the house.
“Your mom and dad offered to take them for a few hours,” Kyle said. “I needed to get some work done on this brief, so I took them up on it.”
“Oh,” Natalie said, pushing down a small flicker of annoyance. “I thought you guys were going to hang out.” Saturday mornings were supposed to be Kyle’s alone time with their kids—a few hours a week for them to spend together, uninterrupted by work or anything else. Normally, Natalie used the time to go shopping for baking supplies or to get prep done on orders she might have upcoming for the week, but her meeting with Brooke had taken priority over any work Natalie needed to get done.
“We did,” Kyle said. “For a bit.” He drummed his long fingers on top of the table. “I just thought it might be easier for us to talk when you got back without them here.”
“Oh,” Natalie said, again. She knew the case he was working on was monopolizing his thoughts, so it made sense that he was working on it now, while he was waiting for her to return. And it actually was thoughtful of him, to give the two of them a little time alone to talk about her brunch with Brooke. Maybe she was being too sensitive.
“So,” Kyle said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms over his chest. “Tell me everything.”
And so Natalie did, recounting the details of her meeting with Brooke. She described her sister to Kyle, and told him about Hailey having her eyes. “You two must each have a recessive gene,” their pediatrician had once told them. “But even with that, there’s only a twenty-five percent chance of two brown-eyed people having a blue-eyed child. One of you has to have a relative somewhere with Hailey’s eye color.” At the time, hearing this had made Natalie’s stomach ache, knowing that since no one in Kyle’s immediate family had blue eyes, the color must have come from someone she would most likely never meet.
“Wow,” Kyle said now. “You’re absolutely sure it’s her?”
Natalie nodded and then told him about the blanket, how Brooke had given it to Natalie when they were separated. “You should have seen her face when I showed it to her. It was like she was a little girl again. It broke my heart.” Natalie didn’t know how to describe what she felt when she saw this other woman—her sister!—sitting across the table, holding that blanket with tears in her eyes. There was something guarded about Brooke, yet something so fragile and vulnerable, too. Even though she was the younger sister, it made Natalie long to gather Brooke up in her arms and tell her everything was going to be all right. Any doubts she had harbored had quickly evaporated.
“Did you guys talk any more about her past?” Kyle asked, attempting to sound casual, but Natalie knew he was fishing for confirmation that some of his suspicions might be true.
“You mean did I ask her for proof that she’s not a hooker?” The instant that barbed comment left her mouth, Natalie regretted it, but his continued skepticism felt unwarranted. Natalie had asked about Zora’s accusation, and Brooke had offered a completely reasonable, believable explanation. She seemed normal, and after her initial hesitation, Natalie wanted to enjoy the fact that she’d met Brooke. She wanted to bask in the pleasure of knowing she was no longer an only child. She had a sister. All of those conversations she’d had lying alone in her bedroom, talking to imaginary playmates, maybe they weren’t so imaginary. Maybe the entire time, she’d been talking to a subconscious memory of Brooke.
“Natalie—” Kyle began, but she cut him off.
“Can you hold off on the judgment until you meet her? Please?”
“I don’t mean to judge,” her husband said, carefully. “I’m just saying that we need to understand more about her.”
“And I’m just saying the only way we’re going to understand anything about her or what her life has been like is if we spend time with her. If I spend time with her, first. It’s not like I asked her to come live with us. We’re meeting for coffee next week, and maybe I’ll see what I can find out about her criminal past then.”
Kyle stared at her for a long minute before speaking. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to ruin this for you. I know how much it means.” He stood up and walked over to her, pulling her up so they could stand face-to-face. He put his strong arms around her. “You just don’t let a lot of people in close to you, honey. At least, not this quickly. I’m feeling protective. That’s all.”
Natalie’s body stayed rigid for a moment, and then she relaxed into her husband’s embrace. He was warm, and smelled like maple syrup. “I get it,” she said against his chest. “But you have to trust me, okay? I’m a pretty good judge of character.”
“Well, that’s true. You did marry me.”
Natalie laughed and shook her head, pulling back far enough that she could look up at his face. “Cocky bastard.”
“Ah yes,” Kyle said with a smile. “But I’m your cocky bastard.” He rubbed a circle on Natalie’s back with one hand while letting the other wander down to cup her ass.
She looked up at him, amused. “Oh, really?”
“Really.” He pressed his hips against her and gave her a good, long kiss that warmed her blood and made her joints feel rubbery and loose. The irritation she’d felt just moments before vanished, and desire took over.
“The kids might be home any minute,” Natalie whispered, snaking her arms up to link her wrists behind his neck.
“Then we’d better be quick,” he said, grabbing her hand and pulling her down the hall to the stairs that led to their bedroom, and Natalie felt like she had when they first met, when they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Once inside their room, he laid her down, and with a firm grip, pinned her arms above her head. Natalie felt her pulse quicken as he stared at her as though he were trying to memorize all the details of her face. “I love you, Nat,” he said, and then she let him take her, knowing that even when they disagreed, Kyle’s honesty was part of what she loved about him. He was her husband. He would always be on her side.
• • •
The next morning, after Natalie had finished with her baking prep for the week’s orders and Kyle got home from playing racquetball with John, she grabbed her cell phone from her purse, which was on the kitchen counter.
“I need to call my mom,” she told her husband, who was in the living room with the kids, keeping them occupied with books and Legos and building forts so Natalie could work without interruption. Yesterday, when her parents had stood on the front porch to drop off the kids, they’d kept the conversation brief and casual, no one acknowledging the life-changing bomb that had been dropped the day Natalie’s mother handed her her adoption file. Still, Natalie noted a muscle twitching beneath her mother’s right eye, a telltale sign of the stress she felt, and she knew she needed to resolve things sooner rather than later.
“Okay,” Kyle said.
“I won’t be long,” Natalie said, and she headed upstairs. She sat on the bed, which was unmade and still smelled faintly sexual after their passionate quickie the day before. She smiled a little to herself, remembering, and then shook her head as though to rid it of those images before she dialed her mother’s phone number.
It only took a few rings for her mother to answer. “Hi, honey,” she said, sounding guarded.
“Hi,” Natalie replied. “Thanks again for taking the kids yesterday. They had a great time.”
“Oh, good.”
Natalie decided the best thing she could do was get right to the point. “So, finding out I have a sister sort of put me in a tailspin. I’m sorry I haven’t called to talk about it.”
“Sweetie—” her mother began, but Natalie interrupted her.
“The truth is, I can’t pretend to understand all your reasons for not telling me about Brooke.” She paused, trying to sort out exactly the right thing to say. “I know you’re afraid of losing me, which you never will, but I guess it makes sense you might feel that way. And I don’t really know how else to tell you this, but I found her. My sister.” The word felt stiff and strange inside Natalie’s mouth, as though it belonged to a foreign language. “I met the social worker who handled our case and it took a few weeks after that. Brooke still lives in Seattle. She grew up here. We talked on the phone Friday, and I met with her yesterday.”
Her mother finally spoke. “Does she know where . . . did you find . . . your birth mother, too?”
“No,” Natalie said, thinking about the way Brooke had shut down when Natalie asked her about their mother. “Not yet.”
“So she . . . your sister,” her mother said, “isn’t in contact with her?”
“No. She grew up in and out of foster homes, but mostly lived at Hillcrest.”
Her mom let out a tiny, surprised yip. “She was never adopted?”
“No.” Natalie was quiet then, letting this bit of information settle in before she spoke again. “I just wanted to be honest with you about what’s going on. I don’t want to keep anything from you.”
“The way we kept this from you,” her mother said in a barely audible voice. She didn’t wait for Natalie’s reply. “I’m so sorry, honey. I wish . . .” Her mother sounded as though she were about to say more, but then allowed her words to trail off into nothing.
“I know,” Natalie said, feeling a flash of suspicion that her parents might still be keeping something from her, but she decided she wasn’t up to pushing the issue. “You did what you thought was best at the time. There’s no way to change it now.”
