His Brother's Bride

Even the sure knowledge that it would be out of pity didn’t make her any less determined to accept the invitation. She was a beggar. She’d take anything.

He reached for her hand.

“How do you know all this?” he asked softly.

“What does it matter?”

“I just can’t believe someone would be cruel enough to tell a child that her mother dropped her off and left her.”

The child he was talking about sounded so pathetic it made her sick. That was her. She made herself sick.

Talking about her past had been the absolute worst decision she’d ever made.

“No one told me.” She tried to get angry, or at least to pretend she didn’t care. “I was there. I heard them talking. Fighting. Many times. I heard what he said. What my mother said. And I was standing there holding her hand when she took me in to leave me with the authorities.”

Just as Scott was holding her hand now.

“How old were you?”

“Four, almost five.”

She heard him suck in a breath and waited for his response. But there was only silence.

“I was too old to be readily adopted. Most families want babies they can name and raise the way they feel best right from the beginning.”

Laurel watched the movie credits scroll up the television screen, and then listened to the pervading silence. She could feel Scott’s hand still holding hers.

“She had to pry my fingers loose to leave me there.”

He covered their locked grip with his free hand.

“They should have been sent to jail,” he said at last.

There’d been a time when she might have agreed with him. But not anymore. She didn’t care what happened to them. It didn’t matter. They no longer mattered.

What hurt so unbearably was that they’d robbed her of any chance of belonging. Ever. She’d never have aunts and uncles and cousins. Never be surrounded by people of whom she was a part, people who accepted her simply because she was family. There was no inner circle she had the right to a place in. She was never going to have anyone tell funny stories about the dumb things she did as a kid, or pull out embarrassing childhood pictures; she was never going to have anyone who’d loved her through all the stages of growing up.

She’d had no one gather around her for her high school graduation, celebrating her victory, claiming it as part of their own. Claiming her. No one to run to when Paul had died.

Mostly she was okay with that. She was used to it now. But sometimes, like tonight, watching Lucy, she could feel all the old pain so acutely.

“It’s really okay,” she said aloud. “I’m healthy. I have no financial worries and a career I love. To a lot of people, I have the perfect life. I don’t know why the family thing matters to me so much, and honestly, most of the time I don’t even think about it. I’m incredibly thankful for what I do have. It’s just that sometimes, like tonight, I get overwhelmed with the fact that no matter how much I do, it will never be enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“Just like Lucy tonight, watching through the window when the family was all gathered around the bed, I’m always going to be on the outside looking in.” She sat up and turned to face him. “And I’m okay with that,” she said. And meant it. “It’s just sometimes when I’ve all but forgotten and it hits me fresh, I have to take a second to get used to the idea all over again.”

Scott’s blue eyes burned with an intense light as he held her gaze. “You are not on the outside,” he said, the words almost a whisper as they caught in his throat.

She shook her head, needing to look away. She had no idea why she didn’t. “Of course I am,” she said. “I can be the nicest person, I can give everything I have to give, do kind things for people every waking moment, but none of that’s going to make me belong to them. I realized that a long time ago. And other than moments like tonight, I’m fine.”

“I’m sure you are,” he said, and sounded as though he meant it. “But you have not always been on the outside. I know this for a fact, because it was my inner circle you occupied.”

She sat there, hardly breathing, wondering if he’d just made that up.

“The minute

you walked in the door at our house all those years ago, you belonged. Immediately and unconditionally. That kind of thing doesn’t change. You became family to me then, Laurel. And you always will be.”