Jennifer nodded, her heart aching for the man she loved. She could only imagine what it must have cost him to live through all he’d described.
“How could I have turned her away when I saw her standing there with an infant in her arms and heard her say, Roarke, I want you to meet your daughter.”
Jennifer’s head came up. “What?”
“Incredible, isn’t it? She’d never even told me about the pregnancy. That she’d given birth to my child damn near nine months to the day after she’d left me?”
“Do you mean—you didn’t know she’d had Susu?”
“I didn’t know a godddamn thing.” Roarke rubbed his hand across his forehead. “I looked at the baby and I kept thinking that I’d helped create this life—”
Jennifer’s throat had gone dry. She swallowed, then swallowed again. “I can’t—I can’t believe it. It just—it just doesn’t make sense. Are you saying that—that—”
“What I’m saying,” he said hoarsely, “is that my sweet, adoring wife was carrying my child when she ran off with another man.” He slammed his fist against the railing. “Can you see it? There she was, in Paris, screwing other men, and all the time she was pregnant with my baby.”
“Paris. Yes. You said Paris. So Susanna was born in Paris…”
“No. Susanna was born in Chicago.”
The world tilted.
“Chicago,” Jennifer said numbly.
“Yeah.” He laughed sharply. “Chicago. About as far away from the world Alexandra knew as it was possible to get.”
Jennifer took a quick step back. She hit the edge of the chaise longue and sank down on it.
“Chicago, Illinois?” she said stupidly.
Roarke turned toward her, smiling for the first time since he’d begun his story.
“That’s
right. Apparently the Midwest specializes in producing beautiful girls with dark hair and blue eyes.”
No. No. It couldn’t be…
“Are you sure?” She cleared her throat. “Are you sure that’s where Susanna was born?”
“I know it’s crazy, but hell, it hurts me that I don’t even remember where I was or what I was doing the night of her birth. I keep trying to remember. January sixteenth, I say to myself, January sixteenth at seven-thirty in the evening.” His face darkened, and he slammed his fist on the railing again. “A father should know these things, damn it!”
Jennifer made a low, keening sound. Roarke spun toward her.
“Sweetheart? Jen, what is it?”
She put her hands to her face. No, she told herself, it was impossible.
Coincidence, that was all it was, a strange coincidence that Alexandra Campbell should have given birth to a daughter in Chicago on the very day, at the very hour, that her daughter was born.
“Jennifer.” Roarke knelt beside her and took her hands in his. “Are you ill?”
But it wasn’t coincidence. She knew, with sudden terrible clarity, that she had reached the end of her search.
Roarke Campbell had, indeed, adopted her daughter.
But he didn’t know it.
He thought Susanna was his child.