The Heart Surgeon's Secret Son

Ryan really was too quick on the uptake for his own good.

“You did see him, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I didn’t know you ever talked about your father with Grandma.”

“We talked about a lot of stuff after she got so sick.”

Near the end her mother had required twenty-four-hour care. Kimberly and Ryan had stayed the nights with her mother, but Ryan spent the late afternoons alone with his grandmother and the nurse Kimberly had hired to sit with her during work hours.

But not once had her mother mentioned telling Ryan about Daniel.

“What did she tell you?”

“That my father broke your heart and didn’t deserve you.”

Yes, that sounded like her mother.

“She was wrong.”

Ryan’s serious young face looked pinched. “You didn’t love him?”

“I loved him very much, but it was me who didn’t deserve him.”

Her son stared at her in confusion. “You’ve lost me.”

“Actually, it was more a case of thinking I didn’t deserve him, that he deserved better than what I could ever give him.” Old hurts opened and as much as she didn’t want her son to see how deep her agony went, she knew the time had come for everything to come out into the open.

“I was a nobody and Daniel was everything when we were at school. Every girl wanted him to notice her. For some reason I caught his eye during his senior year. I was a year behind him and we didn’t have classes together, but that didn’t matter. We found a way to spend as much time together as possible.” Memories flooded her mind. “I admired Daniel so much. He knew exactly what he wanted out of life. A medical degree, to work as a heart surgeon and do research. I’d never met anyone so determined to succeed.” She smiled tenderly at her son. “You’re a lot like him.”

“Don’t say that.” Ryan winced, looking very much like a little boy rather than the young man he was rapidly growing up to be. “I don’t want to be like him.”

Kimberly flinched. “Why? He’s a good man, Ryan.”

“He left you.”

She took Ryan’s hand in hers and held it tight, searching for the right words to explain what had happened all those years ago.

“I knew all along Daniel would forget me once he left for Boston,” she began. “He wrote to me, but neither of us could afford phone calls, and I grew more and more lonely.”

The letters had grown further and further apart and her loneliness had dived into depression, possibly due to her pregnancy, although she hadn’t known the cause at the time.

“When I started being sick all the time and losing weight, I just thought it was nerves, but it wasn’t. I was pregnant.”

She relived the disbelief and terror she’d felt at that time.

“I made a doctor’s appointment and found out for definite a couple of weeks before Daniel was to come home for the Christmas break. I wrote him a dozen letters, telling him, but never mailed them.” How many letters had she poured her heart into, only to crumple the pages and cry herself to sleep?

“I had to tell him in person. So I planned to tell him while he was home. Unfortunately while I was at the doctor’s I ran into one of Daniel’s mother’s friends and she must have seen the guilt on my face, because Leona called me and asked me over.”

“That must have been scary for you,” Ryan commiserated.

“Daniel’s mother never liked me. She resented me because she thought he should be spending his time on more productive things than a girl from the wrong side of town. So it really surprised me when she called. Of course, I said yes.” She’d been so hopeful that Leona had wanted to make peace, possibly because of the baby. Nothing could have been further from the truth. “She laid into me for being so selfish as to get pregnant and how could I destroy Daniel’s life like that?”

Kimberly closed her eyes.

“She sounds like a witch.”

“No.” Kimberly shook her head. Once upon a time she’d hated Leona, but she’d forgiven her long ago. “She just loved Daniel very much and wanted what was best for him.”