A Father's Secret
“Not your problem,” David said succinctly.
“Have a heart,” Sam protested. “I know she did her best to block our attempts to find out if I was Riley’s father, but we have to see her side, too.”
“Why the turnaround? Just ten days you were so angry I thought you were going to ask me to stage an abduction to get Riley out of her evil clutches.”
Sam rose from the chair and began to pace anew. “I know,” he admitted wryly. “But I’ve had time to cool down. To think. She loves him so much. That’s why she fought so hard to block us. I hate to admit it, but if the situation was reversed I probably would’ve done the same.”
“Do you want to revise your bid for full custody?” David sounded confused.
Not his lawyer’s natural state, Sam noted to himself, but nothing about this situation was natural or clear-cut any more.
“Absolutely not,” he said emphatically. That was the one thing he was certain of. Now even more so. “But perhaps we can offer her visitation. She bore him, after all. She’s nursed him and raised him for nearly six months. I have to show some compassion.”
He held up a hand as David began to speak. Knowing, without hearing it, that the lawyer was going to refute what he’d just said. He knew he didn’t have to be fair or reasonable about anything. He had the money and he had the influence to make what he wanted to happen, happen—not to mention, in the eyes of many, the right to raise Riley. But since he’d left Lake Tahoe he hadn’t been able to get Erin out of his mind.
“And a settlement. A generous one. I don’t want her on the street because of all this. She’s as much a victim as I am.”
“Have you sustained a knock to the head or something, Sam?” David asked, then after receiving a stony look from his client he just shook his head. “I know, I know. You’re the client, you call the shots. Well, if you’re one hundred percent certain that’s what you want me to do, I’ll do it. You know, the issue with Erin Connell is cloudy, but she may still have some rights as Riley’s surrogate mother. Rights she hasn’t legally signed away—yet. Perhaps we can forestall any pitfalls here by acknowledging and defining those potential rights immediately. I’ll draw up the papers in the next few days and we can go over them. What sort of settlement amount were you thinking?”
His eyebrows rose when Sam named the sum he wanted.
“You really are serious, aren’t you?” David said, his voice somewhat awestruck.
“I’ve never been more serious in my life. Call me when you have the details ironed out.”
Sam turned on his handcrafted leather heel and walked out of David’s office trying to ignore the feeling that he still hadn’t done quite enough. But he had. He had done everything in his power to do the right thing by his son. And Erin wouldn’t miss out. With the settlement he had proposed she’d have more than enough money to buy a new home, and if she wanted to, attempt IVF again for another child. It was the best he could do, he told himself resolutely.
* * *
Erin tossed the mail she’d cleared from her post office box in town on the kitchen table. She knew she should have been in earlier, but lately she’d barely been able to bring herself to leave the house. When she’d stopped answering her phone, Sasha had made a point to come over each day, to check up on her, and she’d appreciated it, but she’d wanted some space to herself, too. Space in which to grieve, not just for the loss of the relationship she’d hoped to share with Sam, but for her home, her life—nearly everything she held dear.
Riley had fallen asleep in his carrier and she’d managed to transfer him to his crib without his waking. Sometimes she forgot to count her blessings. Through all this time, he’d been an absolute angel. At least she had him. She’d find some way to fight Sam’s bid for full custody—she just had to. It was going to be a tough road, especially since the trustees had given her notice to quit the property so it could be prepared to be gifted to the State.
It felt sometimes as if the blows never stopped falling. When Janet had told her the trust’s details regarding descendants’s right to reside at the property was watertight she’d known it would be only a matter of time before she and Riley would have to pack up their few personal possessions and leave. She didn’t really know what was worse. The years of abuse and neglect she’d endured at her mother’s hands, or this.
It had been horrible growing up without any sense of her home as a safe haven, but in many ways it was harder to finally have the home she’d always wanted and then have it taken away from her. Being forced to walk away from her home, her livelihood, everything, was devastating.