Scott shrugged, one hand on the wheel, the other resting along the window beside him. “I don’t know for sure, yet,” he said. “But I won’t lie to her. I can’t tell her the whole truth, of course, but I’m always honest.”
Laurel knew that about him—the newspaper article he’d had published without her permission notwithstanding. She remembered the time he’d sideswiped his dad’s car pulling out of a fast-food drive-through. The elder Hunter had assumed that someone had dinged the car in a parking lot, leaving Scott off the hook.
He’d confessed, anyway, and had to submit to an entire Saturday afternoon of driving through pylons with his father in the parking lot of Theodore Cooper Elementary School.
“Does that mean we tell her you’re a cop?” Laurel asked, hating to worry the woman when they didn’t really know for sure yet that there was anything to worry about.
She was relieved when Scott shook his head. “Until this case becomes official, we’ll leave my profession out.”
“Can we tell her that we found her birth certificate in the room of a bed-and-breakfast in Cooper’s Corner and wanted to return it to her?”
He grinned at her. “You’re better at this than you let on. That would be a great place to start. We can use that to lead into asking her if she has any idea why it might have been there.”
“And what do we do if she asks whose room we found it in?”
“We tell her that no one was in the room at the time.”
“Which is technically true, but...”
“In this case, ‘technically’ is going to have to do.”
“And what do we do if she pushes for more information?”
His jaw tense, Scott stared straight ahead. “Assuming we’ve ascertained that she knows she’s adopted, we tell her as much of the truth as we know. It’s her birth certificate we’re holding. She probably has the right to know.”
When he put it like that, Laurel couldn’t argue. She just would rather not be the bearer of bad news. She knew how horrible it felt to be the receiver.
Watching Scott’s hand on the steering wheel, Laurel was struck with how absolutely horrible it must have been for him to be the one to tell her about Paul’s death.
At the time she’d only been able to think about the fact that Paul was gone, and it had taken her a long time to comprehend that.
But Scott had suffered a loss, too. His brother was dead, and before he could grieve, he had to break the news to Laurel.
He’d told her with such gentleness, such love and compassion. She wondered where, in the midst of his own pain, he’d found so much strength to give to her.
Gratitude filled her heart to overflowing. Gratitude and love for this man who’d been such a good brother to her—better, she was sure, than if she’d had the biological sibling she’d always longed for.
Sometime before she went back to New York, she was going to thank him for that.
* * *
“TELL ME SOMETHING,” Scott said now, his brow clear as he relaxed back, one hand on the wheel, the other casually thrown across the armrest between them. “How is it that you can always figure out the right way in to other people’s thought processes?”
She turned off her tape recorder.
“I’ve spent my life fitting into other people’s lives.” Survival in the foster system meant having to quickly ascertain, in every new environment, just what the family needed. Why they were opening their home to her. Her only hope of being able to stay awhile was to answer that need.
“That sounds painful.”
“Not really.” Laurel slipped out of her sandals and put one foot up on the corner of the dash. “When you make those around you feel good, you’re generally making yourself feel good, too.”
“Is that what you did with Paul?”
“No,” Laurel sighed. “He was the exception.”
Scott didn’t say anything so she continued. “Paul was the first person I can remember who tried to please me before I even thought about trying to please him. When we were together, he was always concerned about my comfort, both physically and otherwise.”
“You were always doing things for him, too.”