A Mother's Secrets (Parent Portal 4)

“When you have the completed picture you can study it more easily, and the mind naturally tries to make sense out of the things that stand out to us. For some people, the lucky ones, the mind succeeds.”

She was throwing him off course. Yet, he couldn’t argue her logic.

“Not to get too deep or heavy here, but I think that we all know more, deep down, than we consciously see,” she continued as

though they were there to discuss life after death.

Avoiding the real topic on the table?

He took encouragement from that.

Because if she was just going to turn him down, without consideration, there’d be no reason not to just get it done.

Right?

“So maybe that’s why, after someone is gone, it’s easier for us to see the places in her life where she was acting from that deeper place. Maybe it’s those truths that stand out to us when we look at the whole picture that that life represented.”

She was looking at the trinkets on her desk. And there were a lot of them. Colorful fake flowers in a colorful vase, too.

He got the distinct impression that he needed to rescue her. From this conversation, not from the flowers.

And that was bordering on him not being himself again. He was more recluse than rescuer.

“I first met Emily in the emergency room when we were eight,” he said, off plan, but not completely. “She’d been bitten by a dog. I was there because my father was in kidney failure again. It wasn’t my first time hanging out there by a long shot. I saw them bring her in. But I can also remember, to this day, her words as they wheeled her past me. ‘Don’t let them hurt the dog,’ she said. Like I could do anything about any of it. Anyway, I kept walking by the cubicle where they’d taken her, and one time, the curtain around her was open. She asked me if I wanted to see her dog bite up close. Which, of course, as a kid, I did. She asked me if I wanted to be her friend, and I nodded. We got to talking, and when her mom came back from having used the bathroom, Emily announced that she and I were friends and her mom smiled and asked me my name, as though I belonged. I spent most of that afternoon in her little cubicle while they waited for whatever they were waiting for. When they finally came in to stitch her up, I got up to go and she asked me to stay. And when she was released and in the wheelchair on her way out, she told me to remember that we were friends. I remember thinking she was a bit goofy to think that we’d ever see each other again, but I liked the sentiment. I told her goodbye. And she said, ‘See ya.’”

Not goodbye. “See ya.” As though she’d known...

“A month later, when I went back to school, there she was, the new girl in our third grade class.”

“What happened with your father?” Christine asked.

“I imagine he spent the night at the hospital, though I don’t have specific memory of that. He most always did when he went into failure. He’d been in a bad car wreck before I was born. Both of his kidneys had ruptured. He had another transplant the year that I met Emily, but he died when I was in junior high.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged off the sympathy. In some ways his childhood had been hard, with so much time spent in hospitals due to his dad being so sick, but in others, it had been the best. His mom and dad had always been there for him. Doing fun things with him. Giving him a solid base of love and security. His mom was still that. As was his stepfather, the man who’d been his father’s best friend.

“Emily somehow knew we’d meet again,” he said, getting the conversation back on track. “She knew that our friendship was real. And she took comfort from it that day, squeezing my hand and not crying at all as they stitched her up, letting me watch.”

He’d almost cried, she’d hurt his hand so bad.

“I think she also knew, when she went into that surgery a year ago, that she wasn’t going to make it. Or at the very least, she knew she had to provide for me in the event that she didn’t make it. Her last words were a promise to me that our baby would be born. She made me promise that I believed her.”

Christine’s gaze narrowed. She swallowed.

But she seemed to have no calm and steady words of compassion to offer.

* * *

Dr. Jamison Howe was either one hell of a con man, or he was about the most unusual person she’d ever met.

He wasn’t a scammer. There was no reason to con her. He could get what he wanted, a woman to carry his child, in any number of legally vetted health clinics across the state.

Which left unusual.

He was getting to her.

It was a first.