A Father's Secret

Erin flicked on the coffee machine and picked up the envelopes, idly thumbing through them while she waited for the machine to finish. She sorted them into different piles—ones she knew were related to the lodge, personal ones, junk mail. She hesitated over the second-to-last envelope in the stack. The high-quality heavy white envelope with the subtle logo and return address had escaped her notice when she’d collected the mail, but she recognized it instantly now.

Sam’s lawyers. Her blood ran cold and she put that envelope to one side, not quite ready yet to read in deliberate black and white, the extent of his threat to her. Maybe she should have returned those calls Janet had been leaving on her answering machine the past few days.

Mechanically she went through the motions of pouring her coffee and taking it to the table, debating whether or not to call Janet now. After all, forewarned was forearmed, right? But some gut instinct told her that no matter what Janet had to say, it wouldn’t change what was in that envelope. She’d have to deal with it, one way or another. Erin sat in a chair and turned the large envelope over in her hands. She couldn’t put it off any longer. She slid the tip of her little finger under the tiny open bit at the edge of the flap and tore it away until she could slide her whole finger into the gap and rip open the packet.

Carefully, she pulled out a folded sheaf of papers clipped to a covering letter. Her eyes skimmed the letter once, twice, three times. It didn’t make sense. It couldn’t.

She flicked to the next page, which tabulated laboratory results, twice. Both the first test she’d had done and the second. She shook her head, unable to believe the evidence before her very eyes.

She was not Riley’s mother.

“No!” The word slipped from her in a tortured wail as a spasm of pain more intense than anything she had ever endured before knifed through her body.

She wasn’t Riley’s mother? That was impossible. It couldn’t be true. She’d felt the unbelievably sweet flicker of his first movements, carried him to term. She’d nearly lost her life giving birth to him, a birth so full of complications that it was impossible for her to bear another child. She’d nurtured him from the moment she’d been able to. How could she not be his mother? The emptiness she’d felt since learning Sam was Riley’s father was nothing compared to the clawing pain that scored her now.

Riley was her baby, her son—the child of her heart. It wasn’t enough that the clinic had made a mistake with the fertilization, but to have made such a disastrous error as to impregnate her with another couple’s baby? It was wrong on so many levels she couldn’t even begin to grasp them. All she knew was that it hurt, it hurt so badly she wondered if she would ever be able to function properly ever again.

Her coffee had gone stone-cold by the time she summoned the courage to continue to read the papers that had been included in the packet. It appeared the mistake had been deliberate. Further investigation had shown that the incident had been what caused the whistle-blower to come forward. James and Erin’s sole viable embryo from their IVF had been accidentally destroyed. The whistle-blower had been instructed to find a replacement embryo for implantation to hide the fact that the mistake had occurred. One of three embryos, readied for another couple due for implantation on the same day, had been implanted instead. That couple had never made it to the clinic because of a car wreck.

Everything now fell into awful place. Sam’s guilt over his wife’s death, his determination to find out if Riley was his son. She wondered, briefly, if he’d been as shocked as she was over the news that she’d carried his and Laura’s child. It was too much to take in, all of it.

Hot tears spilled from her eyes and tracked down her cheeks. Tremors began to rack her body, at first small and then bigger and bigger until she began to sob out loud. Harsh wrenching sobs that filled the room with her anguish, an anguish she knew nothing could ever assuage.

When reality began to set in, Erin knew deep in her heart that there was no way, now, that Sam’s petition to have full custody of Riley could be unsuccessful. No way on earth. And how could she, in all honesty, contest his right to his son, the child who’d resulted from his DNA and his wife’s? It would be contesting Riley’s right to his real father, a man she already knew, firsthand, loved the little boy. She’d seen it in his eyes, in his actions, in every moment he’d been able to share with Riley during his time at the lodge.

But she’d borne Riley, she was the only mother he knew and he depended on her.