Her Soldier's Baby

In their defense, they’d expected her to join them eventually. To graduate from high school in Florida. Her mother had decorated a suite just for her, with her own bathroom. Eliza was the one who’d opted to stay in South Carolina. They’d agreed to let her do so as long as she agreed to get good enough scores in high school to be able to attend Harvard.

She just hadn’t been able to picture Pierce coming home to that house in Florida.

As it turned out, he hadn’t come to South Carolina, either. Not until a long time later.

“That’s it. Just breathe. Calm will come,” Mrs. Carpenter said. Which was when Eliza realized the woman was still holding her hand.

She felt like an idiot. Slipped her hand out from the counselor’s and sat up straighter. “I had a baby.”

The sky didn’t fall.

“I’ve...actually never told anyone...not since the day they took him away from me.” She’d been sixteen. Had been in labor for almost two days. Had been certain she was going to die—that she was paying for having sinned so horrendously. She’d been delirious before it was over. “I never even saw him.”

She’d been told he was perfect.

“Was that your choice?” Mrs. Carpenter’s tone was soft.

It had been her parents’ choice. They’d also insisted that she be homeschooled during her pregnancy. Which was why she’d been shipped to her grandmother. Her mother’s mother had been a schoolteacher before she’d retired to go into the B and B business.

“It was for the best,” was all she said. Her parents had given in to her need to stay, permanently, with the grandmother who’d saved her life that year—emotionally if not physically. But their acquiescence had come with cost. After her baby was born, she was never to speak of it again. Not to tell anyone. Ever. When she’d started attending her new school her senior year, she was just a new girl. They said to handle it. Any other way would brand her as someone who couldn’t control herself. Who didn’t make wise choices. Who was irresponsible.

There was truth to that.

“So...you’ve never told anyone you had a baby?”

The caring in Mrs. Carpenter’s tone brought tears to her eyes. She shook her head.

“I notice you’re wearing a wedding ring...” The words trailed off.

Eliza looked over, meeting the counselor’s compassionate gaze. “He doesn’t know I’m here.”

She expected some reaction to that. Horror. Disgust. Shock, at least.

Judgment.

“So, tell me about this letter.”

“I didn’t realize that Family Adoptions had sister agencies,” she said, naming the agency her grandmother had chosen in South Carolina all those years ago.

“We’re one of the few licensed nonprofits with offices around the country. It opens our pool of birth mothers and adopting families to suit everyone better, while still allowing us to do on-site home studies over the course of a couple of months for each one.”

Up until a month ago, Eliza hadn’t known the ins and outs of adopting a baby. She’d trusted her grandmother to make certain her son had a good home. She’d trusted the agency she’d visited one bleak day that horrible fall.

She knew now how families were vetted. The paperwork and legalities and home visits. The social workers assigned to prospective families. All of it had comforted her. She wished she’d done the research sooner.

And yet, how could she research something that, for all intents and purposes, had never happened?

She’d borne the child but had no rights to him. At all.

“I gave up all rights,” she said now. Except the one her grandmother had insisted upon. “Except that he’s allowed to know who I am. If he ever asks.”

Mrs. Carpenter nodded.

“His family got him through this office,” she said.

Feeling slightly woozy, muddled, Eliza stared at the gray patent leather shoes. Wondered how long she’d be able to walk in them if she owned a pair.

“Has he asked to see you?” The soft words broke into her consideration of crunched toes, foot cramps and blisters. None of which were likely to be a problem for her.

Because she’d been wearing heels since she was seventeen. And because she wasn’t likely to be wearing four-inch ones any time soon. She was an innkeeper. The owner of Rose Harbor Bed-and-Breakfast. Making a home away from home for hundreds of people every year.

“No,” she said now. “The letter just told me that he’d contacted your office to inquire about my identity. I guess I had the right to know that they’d given him what information they had on me. My name, where I was living at the time of the adoption and the office through which he originated.”

Nothing else. It was so...open-ended.

But tightly shut, too.

What if he wanted to find her and couldn’t? She’d married. Her name was different.

And the address was, too. Back then, her grandmother had lived in a separate house off Shelby Island. She’d managed Rose Harbor in those days. But the year Eliza had graduated from high school, when her grandmother had turned sixty and had been able to access her retirement fund without penalty, she’d used it to buy Rose Harbor.

What if he found her, came knocking on the door, and Pierce answered?

“I...came here to find out...”

She broke off as she started to shake. And get too warm again.

“If, as you say, you gave up all rights, I can’t give you any information on him.”

Swallowing, she attempted a smile, one she gave to reassure an agitated guest, and failed. “I know,” she managed. “I’m not asking. I just...wanted to know if you could maybe find out...somehow...if he wants to see me.”

Please, God. Yes. Let me meet my baby boy. Finally. Please. Just to touch his hand once. To look in his eyes one time before I die.

Oh. God. No. Have him be happy. Fulfilled. In want of nothing. Including the need to see the woman in whose body he was created.

Mrs. Carpenter shook her head. “If there’s something in his file that indicates that he’s open to seeing you, I can pass on your information. But generally, if that were the case, the letter you received would have indicated as much.”

The counselor took her name anyway. The case number that Eliza had memorized from the letter that she’d shredded. Taking a bottle of water from the small refrigerator under a counter across from them, Mrs. Carpenter handed it to Eliza, asked if she’d be okay for a few minutes and, at Eliza’s nod, left the room.

Eliza wasn’t okay. Her fingers shook so badly, she dropped the cap of the water bottle after opening it. And in her black pants and white cropped jacket, Eliza dropped to her knees to reach under the desk it rolled under.

Back in her seat, she pulled out her phone. Read Pierce’s text telling her that he was home and that everything was on course for social hour.

He didn’t include any silly emoticons or anything that could indicate how very much in love he was with his wife.

But those words, reassuring her, read like an avowal of undying love.

Longing for the life she’d built, the adrenaline rush of being in her own parlor with guests who were happy with her accommodations, happy with the hors d’oeuvres she’d served them, Eliza wished she’d stayed home. Auditioning, traveling across the country like this...it had been a mistake. She should be home, basking in the knowledge that when her guests retired for the night, she’d be going to bed with Pierce. To fall asleep in the arms of the only man she’d ever loved.

She wanted to answer the text. Typed. Deleted. Typed. Deleted. She couldn’t lie to him. Couldn’t tell him where she was. Or why she was there.

She hated not being able to tell him.

Fear shot through her as she considered the Pandora’s box she’d opened.

But she hadn’t opened it.

Her baby boy had opened it. He’d asked about her.

There was no way she could ignore any possibility that he needed her.

No way Pierce would want her to.

And no way she could tell him that she’d given away the only child he would ever father.

CHAPTER THREE

LILY ELIZABETH MCCONNELL had been married thirty years. “Not long enough,” the fifty-something, salt-and-pepper-haired woman told Pierce as she stood, a china plate holding a couple of Eliza’s miniquiches in her hands. “You take it for granted, you know?”

Her eyes were glassy with emotion, but her voice was calm. Pierce respected the control. “I do know,” he said wholeheartedly. “Sad, isn’t it, that you have to lose something to realize what it meant to you?”

He hadn’t meant to speak that last bit out loud. But the woman’s need tapped into the vulnerability he normally had buried so deep he could pretend it didn’t exist.

He was always a bit off when Eliza was gone.

The well-dressed widow tilted her head. “You’ve lost someone, too?” she asked.

He’d walked right into that one.

Music played softly from good-quality speakers resourcefully hidden among the genuine antiques that filled—and garnished—the room. Classical piano. He recognized Pachelbel’s Canon only because it was Eliza’s favorite and she had what seemed like a million renditions of it.

He didn’t want to offend the guest, but he wished the couple in the corner enjoying the free wine were more open to socializing. Or that the families he’d been told had checked in would come downstairs.

“I have,” he told Mrs. McConnell, taking a sip from the glass of iced lemon water he’d poured before leaving his and Eliza’s private section of the mansion to do his duties as host.

There. They could have mutual understanding, as the strangers they were, and move on. Glancing over her shoulder, he noted the still-empty stairway. No families coming down yet.

Lily Elizabeth McConnell seemed as interested in his hand as he was in the staircase.

“You’re wearing a wedding ring,” she said when she caught him noticing her stare.

Awkward. And the reason he hated these things.

“Yet you’re here alone. Did you lose your wife?”

He knew how to parry a come-on. And did. Every single time he was faced with one. This wasn’t a come-on. If the woman’s tone hadn’t told him so, the pain in her eyes did.

“No,” he said. No playing with fate on that one. “I just assumed everyone here knew... Eliza’s away being a contestant on Family Secrets every weekend this month. This is our home, but the bed-and-breakfast, that’s all her doing. I’m strictly support staff when it comes to Rose Harbor.”

He helped her with the books, too. She ran all decisions by him. But the house was hers. Eliza had been running the successful B and B long before he’d come back into her picture.

Mrs. McConnell nodded. Looked down at her sensible, almost flat black shoes. He wasn’t the most sensitive guy around, but even he could tell that her pain, in that moment, was acute.

“What about kids?” he blurted. People her age relied on their kids. Didn’t they?

She shook her head. And he’d have gladly escaped to keep from saying anything else that didn’t help. “We... Harley and I...we never had kids. It wasn’t that we didn’t want them. It just never happened. And neither of us wanted to pursue other avenues. We figured if we were meant to be parents, we’d get pregnant.”

Were it him, he’d have pursued every avenue there was and any dirt lane, too. But this wasn’t about him. “I get what you mean about not being meant to be a parent,” he said before realizing that they’d ventured outside guest-welcoming territory.

“You and your wife don’t have children?” she asked. And he just stood there. Staring at her.

Eventually he shook his head.

And as though fate had stepped in to save him for once, footsteps bounded down the stairs. Mrs. McConnell took the interruption as an opportunity to move back to the food station that Margie, Eliza’s assistant for the past ten years, had laid out.

Maybe she thought he and Eliza had lost a child. He had, after all, told her he’d lost someone.

Lord knew why he’d said that. He’d never lost anyone he was close to.

His mother had taken off before he was old enough to remember her. His old man was gone, but since he’d been drunk so much of Pierce’s life, that hadn’t been a big surprise. At least he’d been a nice drunk.

Pierce had had no reason to commiserate with the woman’s loss as though he understood. Living without Eliza all those years—that had been his choice. He’d consciously opted not to contact her when he’d gotten back from the war in Iraq, a changed man. One who’d been hit by an explosive device that left him sterile.

After going by her place in Savannah, where they’d grown up, finding out that she’d moved to South Carolina the summer he left and that her folks were in Florida, he’d gotten on with his life. A life without her. Except for keeping tabs, just to make certain she was thriving. That’s how he’d known she was at Harvard while he finished his time in the marines as a cop at Quantico.

And known that she’d graduated and was running a bed-and-breakfast when he’d married a fellow marine shortly after getting out. And that she was still there three years later, when he married his second wife. A waitress from the coffee shop where he had breakfast every morning.

The woman had a young son. Pierce had fancied himself a father.

He just hadn’t been a good husband. Too distant. Too many nightmares. No desire to spend his off time with the woman he’d married.

Turned out, he hadn’t been a great father, either.

Nope, he hadn’t lost anyone. He’d made conscious choices.

And would probably make them again if he had a second go at it. Including the one that had resulted in an inability to father children. Some days he figured he’d deserved that. He’d still choose to join the army, too. If he was going to make anything of himself, get away from the reputation he’d earned as the son of the town drunk, get any kind of education, he’d have had to join up. He’d had no money for college. Nowhere to live, no way to support himself during the four years of attending classes to get a higher degree. No way to support the love of his life, or prove to her father that he was good enough for her, unless he joined the army, worked until every bone in his body ached, and earned not only money but also respect.

No, as hard as leaving Eliza had been, it was a choice he’d make again. For the same reasons.

Even the worst choice he’d ever made, given the same situation, the same intel, he’d make again, because when you made choices you got only the before, not the after. He hadn’t known that that one choice would irrevocably change his world. Change him.

One choice. A split second. The pull of a trigger.

And Pierce Westin had lost his soul.

* * *

“I’M SORRY FOR the long wait, Eliza. Thank you for your patience.”

Mrs. Carpenter came into the room quietly. Efficiently. All business.

From the chair she was clinging to like a life raft, Eliza nodded. Forced a smile. She didn’t do this whole fragile thing well. Her days didn’t require it.

Her life didn’t require it.

Because she’d kept her secret. Banished it to the past. Made a life without it, just as her parents had espoused.

She was beginning to see why they’d been so adamant. And figured they’d been right.

She watched the counselor take a seat. Fold her hands. And knew.

This wasn’t good news.

“I’ve looked through your file,” Mrs. Carpenter told her. “Your adoption was a bit...unique...” she said. “Private adoptions have more leeway as far as terms are concerned. According to your documents, your child is to be given any information we have about you, anytime he asks. But it was further agreed that even if you ask, you are not to be given information about him.”

She hadn’t known that.

“I’m assuming you knew that. Your signature was on every page.”

Okay, so maybe she had known. She hadn’t remembered. She’d been just shy of her seventeenth birthday. Scared to death. Heartbroken.

If only Pierce had contacted her. Even once...

If only she’d known then that her father had had a very firm talk with Pierce after he’d joined the army. Feeding Pierce’s fears that he wasn’t good enough for her. That she was destined for great things, a settled and successful society waiting for her, that nothing about her assets was suited to the moving around required by military life.

Pierce could have told her. Said now that maybe he should have told her that part. He’d still have joined up—and hadn’t wanted to bad-talk her father to her.

And what was done was done. They’d determined before they’d married seven years before that the only way for either of them to find happiness was to let go of the hurts they couldn’t change. And be thankful for all the great years they had left to share. To make the most of every minute of those years.

To realize that they, unlike so many others, had a special appreciation of their love that would prevent them from falling into the habit of taking that love, taking each other, for granted like they’d both seen happen with so many other couples.

“I can’t even know his name?” she asked, after taking as long as she could to assimilate her situation and pull herself together.

Clearly she hadn’t done either, yet.

Mrs. Carpenter shook her head. To give the woman her due, she didn’t seem in any kind of hurry to get Eliza out of there.

“You do have the right to stipulate if you’d rather we not give him any further information about you,” the woman said after another few minutes of standby.

Eliza knew Mrs. Carpenter was waiting for her to go. She just didn’t.

Thoughts of the gathering in the hotel lobby, due to start in less than two hours, skirted across her mind. She watched the other contestants flit about like in some kind of weird movie. A flash of the lobby. A group of strangers.

“Can he give his permission for me to know about him?”

“His parents were willing to give that information at the time of the adoption,” Mrs. Carpenter said. “This is a strange situation. Clearly you feared that at some point in your life you’d want to revisit this situation, but from what you knew at the time of the adoption, with everything still clear in your mind, you wanted to protect your future self from the eventuality.”

“I was sixteen.”

“You’d been counseled for months. And asked your father to sign the papers, as well.”

She kind of remembered that.

“You re-signed them when you turned eighteen,” Mrs. Carpenter said softly, as though not sure what she was dealing with, a rational human being or a crazy lady. Eliza didn’t blame her. She wasn’t sure herself.

“I did?” she said.

“Yes.”

She might have. She’d been so messed up back then. Hardened. Hurting beyond what she could bear. Her parents—and her grandmother—just kept telling her to look forward. To effect that which she could effect. To use the past as a lesson. To take every opportunity to make a good life for herself.

She’d signed a few things. To be executor of her grandmother’s estate in the event that anything happened to her, even though, in Eliza’s mother’s eyes, she was still just a kid. Her mother had thought she should be the one with power of attorney over her own mother’s estate. It hadn’t happened that way.

Eliza’s grandmother had made a will of her own.

Taken out a life insurance policy.

A readmission of her adoption papers could very well have been one more piece of business to be dealt with and filed away.

Standing, Mrs. Carpenter came toward her. Eliza expected to be shown out. There really was nothing more for them to say. Instead, the woman sat down in the chair next to her and took Eliza’s hand. “Were you raped?”

What? “No!” Was that what her parents had told people? Was that how they’d saved face?

She’d thought leaving town before anyone had known she was pregnant had done that.

Mrs. Carpenter looked at her in a way that made Eliza feel like she was being professionally assessed.

“I had one very, very wonderful, if completely inappropriate, night with a boy I loved very much,” she said softly.

The words wouldn’t stay back. Wouldn’t remain unsaid. She and Pierce...that night...deserved better than that.

More words flew to her throat as though they’d all been waiting for release.

But with so many years of silence, she managed to contain them. They were making her nauseated, all bottled up in there. But in there they stayed.

Because what would she say? How crazy would this counselor think her if she knew that Eliza was now married to that same boy? But that he knew nothing about the son he’d fathered?

To know would do neither of them any good. It would be more of the hurt from the past that could prevent happiness in their future. More angst, acrimony. More whys without answers.

They couldn’t have their son. And Pierce couldn’t father another one. It seemed too cruel to let him know what he’d missed. And to what end? So that he could hate himself for not contacting her after he left?

So they could both die of what-ifs?

“I have to ask you again,” Mrs. Carpenter broke into her thoughts. Oddly, having come full circle, Eliza felt no more certain of anything, no less vulnerable. And yet she’d found her strength.

“Ask what?”

“At this point, all your son has done is make one query into your information. Do you want to update what we have so that, if he comes back, he can contact you?”

Her heart started to pound again. “Can you contact him and let him know it’s here? That I’ve been here and left updated information?”

She supposed she wasn’t surprised when Mrs. Carpenter shook her head. She was disappointed. Hugely so. But back in control, she nodded. Took a breath.

Did she want this young man to be able to call her out of the blue? Any time of the day or night or year? Just to show up, unannounced at their door?

Yes! Of course! Absolutely!

And what about Pierce? What if he was having one of his bad spells? Or even if he wasn’t? Was it fair to him to open the door to this possibility? To the fact that at any moment, he could come face to face with his son without even knowing he had one?

If she did this...gave Mrs. Carpenter her information, gave her son the ability to contact her...she had to tell Pierce that the young man existed.

First.

“Can I call you and do that?” she asked now.

“Of course.” Mrs. Carpenter sat back.

Was Eliza no longer sounding like she was about to lose her marbles, then? She still felt like she was.

“You do realize there’s a possibility, given the internet, that he could find you anyway, right?”

Fear shot through her.

Mixed with excitement.

“That’s why I came,” she said. “To find out what the future might hold.”

Maybe she’d hoped to be able to see her son on her own. To know if finding out about him would cause Pierce more pain than good. To know if, regardless of the pain, their son needed them.

That had been the closer. If the boy needed them, she and Pierce had to put their own regrets, their own pain, aside and be there for him.

“I want him to have my information,” she said. “I want him to be able to contact me. But I need to take care of something first. I will be contacting you just as soon as I’ve gotten that done. I don’t know exactly when that will be...how soon...but it will be as soon as I can get it done.” She was babbling. Pedaling forward and back. Afraid for Pierce. Afraid for their son.

Mrs. Carpenter took her hand again. “That’s fine, hon. You don’t have to do this. That’s why you gave him up for adoption in the first place. So that he would be the son—the responsibility—of someone else. Whatever prompted you to do so...you clearly did what you thought best. What your parents thought best, too, based on what I read. You have no reason to feel guilty. Or obligated...”