A Daughter's Trust

“And you had no problem giving it up after all that time?”

Now he was trespassing. “Having problems is relative,” she said. Her last long-term baby had been with her seven months. Dante’s mother had loved her son enough to straighten out her life. She’d visited every single day those last couple of months. Handing him over to her had been as much a celebration as it had been a loss.

“There’s always another one,” she said now, hoping that Dante’s mom was still as dedicated to her boy when he was three and four and into everything as she’d been when he was a cuddly little baby.

The revolving door at the front of the foyer turned again, admitting a middle-aged man with a briefcase and a cell phone pressed to his ear who disappeared through one of many identical doors.

Where were

her parents?

And then something else dawned on Sue.

“I thought you and your dad’s half brother, your uncle Daniel, were your dad’s only family.” Joe had said so when his grandma Jo had passed away several years before.

“We are.”

“Your uncle didn’t die, did he?”

“No. He’s still here in San Francisco. Still in construction.” Though she’d never met Daniel Kane, Sue felt as though she knew him. Joe had idolized him. Only nine years older, Daniel had been there when Joe was young, and hadn’t seemed to mind him tagging along. Adam’s and Daniel’s mother was Joe’s Grandma Jo—the woman who’d raised all three.

Daniel had given Joe his start in the construction business.

“So who passed away?” Sue asked again, staring at the man who’d fathered—and then abandoned—her onetime best friend. “Someone from his dad’s side?”

Adam Fraser’s father had been a soldier in World War II. He’d made it back from the war only to be killed in a car accident before Adam was even born. But apparently no one from his dad’s family had ever tried to see Adam. Or be a part of his life.

“He says he doesn’t know what’s going on.” Joe sounded more bored than anything. “He claims he got a call from some attorney and was told he needed to be here this morning for the reading of a will.”

“Surely the guy gave him the name of the deceased.”

“Yeah, but he says he doesn’t have any idea who the woman is.”

“That’s odd.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“You don’t believe him. You think he knows?”

“How many people get calls out of the blue telling them they’re supposedly named in a will of someone they’ve never met?”

“It happens.”

“On TV.”

“So what reason could he possibly have for lying?”

“Because he has something to hide?”

“Then why bring you along?”

“How do I know? I barely know the man.”

Hard to believe she’d once been privy to Joe’s every thought.

“You’re here.”

“He’s my father.”