She’d never take anything at face value again. That was for damned sure.
She sucked in a deep breath. Whatever it is, whatever his last laugh is, I can take it, she told herself. I’m stronger than I know. Just keep chanting that and maybe it’ll be true.
The attorney glanced at her, and she nodded.
“‘Our son’s twin sister didn’t die during childbirth,’” the lawyer read on a gasp, his eyes widening.
Sara gasped too. What? They stared at each other, his face as pale as hers must be.
The lawyer sucked in a breath and continued reading. “‘The female twin was frail, much smaller than the male. But very much alive. Thank God I’d insisted on a home birth with a midwife, or I’d never have been able to do what I did.’”
She grabbed the sides of the chair. Her mind went blank, the air whooshing out of her, blackness threatening. What did you do, Willem? What the hell did you do?
The lawyer leaned back, took off his glasses and scrubbed a hand over his face.
“Finish the letter,” Sara said, hearing the panic rise in her voice.
What happened to my baby girl?
Holton nodded, his expression grim. “‘I threatened the midwife and paid her off not to call for medical intervention and to back me up when I told you the female didn’t survive the birth. Don’t be too hard on the poor lady. She accepted the bribe for the same reason you married me. She desperately needed the money.’”
The lawyer glanced at her then, and Sara, feeling her face flame, lifted her chin.
“‘I told you the baby died,’” the lawyer continued reading, “‘then while you were sleeping, I drove it out to Noah Dawson’s place—’”
Sara bolted up. “Noah? Noah has my daughter?”
Her head was spinning. Her daughter was alive? And with Noah Dawson?
“Let’s finish the letter,” Holton said. “There’s only one paragraph left.”
Sara nodded, tears brimming as she dropped back on the chair.
The attorney cleared his throat. “‘With my male heir healthy, I had no need for a sickly-looking daughter. To be quite honest, I don’t particularly like girls. They grow up to become conniving users, don’t they? I drove the baby out to Dawson’s cabin and left her on his porch with that starter kit the midwife had on hand and a note saying it was his baby and his responsibility. For all I know, the twins are his. Maybe you were cheating on me with him during our entire marriage. Since I don’t know whether any of that is true, it means it could be. Since it could also not be, I’ll leave my son the bulk of my estate in trust for when he turns twenty-one. The rest will go to the development of a golf course named in my honor. You, as you already know, get nothing. Not a cent.’” The lawyer paused and put down the letter. “That’s the extent of it. It’s signed ‘Willem Michael Perry.’”
My daughter didn’t die. She’s alive.
“For the past seven weeks, Noah Dawson has had my daughter?” she whispered, the blackness threatening again.
She tried to remember back to the moment when the midwife—a gentle woman in her early sixties who’d come highly recommended—placed Chance on her chest. Tears had been brimming in the woman’s eyes over what Sara had assumed was the loss of the baby girl she’d helped deliver. Sara had felt so woozy, despite Willem’s insistence she take no drugs. She must have fallen asleep hard after initially nursing Chance, because she’d woken up hours later, Willem letting her know Chance was sleeping like a champ in the nursery and that the midwife had gone home and that they’d taken care of the details for the loss of the twin.
She’d been so woozy still, her head feeling like it was stuffed with cotton, and she’d been so grateful that she hadn’t lost both babies that she’d made her way to the nursery and held Chance against her. Her precious son had gotten her through the terrible truth that his sister hadn’t survived. Over the next few days, Willem had resumed his usual twelve-hours-per-day work schedule, so she hadn’t had to deal with him controlling her in person, though he’d left detailed emails about how to hold Chance, feed him, his nap schedule, and that no one was to visit until he’d had his shots.
Her baby girl was alive. And Sara wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Willem had slipped something into her water during labor, some kind of drug to keep her off balance and to make her sleep hard afterward.
Why would he take the baby to Noah, though? Willem had hated Noah Dawson.
“Sara, I’m afraid I have to prepare you for the possibility that the female twin didn’t survive Willem’s actions,” the lawyer said, shaking her out of her question. “Left on a doorstep in the middle of the night? The second week of April, when it was still a bit chilly? Who knows when Mr. Dawson discovered the baby? If he was even home at the time? Didn’t he very recently inherit the old Dawson guest ranch? I read that they’re set for a grand opening this weekend, but I can’t imagine how, given how run-down the place was.”
She hadn’t known Dawson’s was reopening. She’d heard that Noah’s widowed father had died and that he’d left the dilapidated ranch to his six children. She’d thought about going to the funeral but wasn’t sure she’d be welcome. She’d been showing then and didn’t want to make Noah uncomfortable, so she’d stayed home. She also would have had to get around Willem about where she was going, and she hadn’t had the energy for that.
When she’d woken up about three hours after giving birth, the rain had been coming down hard. Willem had left their daughter on a ranch porch in the middle of the night during a rainstorm? The Dawson ranch in Bear Ridge was over an hour away from the Perry house in Wellington.
She swallowed back a wail building up deep inside her. “I’m going to see Noah now. My daughter is alive. I feel it.”
“I hope so, Sara,” Holton said. “It seems clear that Willem expected this letter to be read decades from now. There are two bombshells, really. Your daughter. And the midwife’s culpability. We can discuss options for how to proceed there.”
She’d deal with that later. Right now, she only wanted to see her baby girl with her own eyes. Hold her. Get her back.
She reached for her long cardigan and put it on, then gripped the handle of Chance’s stroller. He was fast asleep.
“Sara, again, I’m very sorry,” Holton said. “I hate to bring this up right now, but I do need to tell you that you’ll need to vacate the house within fourteen days. You may take your personal possessions, but everything else now belongs to the estate. If there’s anything you’d like to take, do it before tomorrow, when the appraisals will begin.”
She nodded again. She couldn’t wait to leave that house. Where she’d move, she had no idea. But she did know where she was going now.
To see Noah Dawson. And get her baby girl.
* * *
“Should we give Bolt an apple slice?” Noah asked his baby daughter, snug in the carrier strapped to his chest.
He stood at Bolt’s stall in front of the small barn beside his cabin, the mare nudging his arm for her apple. “We should? I agree.” He pulled the baggie of apple slices from his pocket.
Annabel didn’t respond, but according to the book on your baby’s first year, she wouldn’t make sounds or coo for another couple of weeks.
He’d learned quite a bit about babies in the past seven weeks. He’d been right that Annabel had only been hours old when she’d been left on his porch. Doc Bakerton had been a grouch at being woken up at 2:20 in the morning—until he’d seen why Noah had come blazing over.
Because Bakerton was getting up there in years—nearing eighty—and had long been a rural doctor, he hadn’t said anything about calling the sheriff or social services. Noah had showed him the note he’d found in the carrier, and that had been good enough. “The system doesn’t need another abandoned baby when the perfectly good father is standing up,” the doctor had said with a firm nod. Bakerton dec
lared the infant healthy but small, recommended two possible pediatricians to follow up with and sent Noah on his way to beat the worst of the rain.
And so a little over twenty minutes after arriving, Noah had taken the baby home, shell-shocked but focused on the immediate here and now, not even tomorrow. The doc had given Noah some samples of formula and more diapers and wipes and had made a list of the basics Noah should buy in the morning.
Some of the shock had started to wear off while he’d been at Bakerton’s, mostly because he’d realized he could simply leave the infant with the doctor, who’d call whoever needed to be called. The sheriff. Social services. And that would be that.
But what Bakerton had said kept echoing in his head as he’d watched him move that little stethoscope around the tiny back and chest...when the perfectly good father is standing up.
Noah Dawson, perfectly good father? He would have burst out laughing if the situation hadn’t been so incredibly lacking in humor. Thing was, after all that he’d been through, all he’d lost, after the bad day he’d had with a sick calf, Noah had appreciated the extra show of faith in himself as a human being, and Bakerton had uttered the right words at exactly the right moment. The note said the baby was his. The perfectly good—or able, he figured Bakerton had meant—father was here with the infant, doing exactly what he should be doing. That was two for two on the faith scale.
He’d driven slow as his late grandmother’s molasses back to the ranch in the pouring rain, and once inside he’d gone straight to his laptop, holding the tiny baby along his arm as he watched a YouTube video on how to mix formula, how to hold the bottle—how to hold a newborn, for that matter. Turns out he hadn’t been doing that too wrong. He’d watched each video twice. By the time he’d closed his laptop, word had come that the river had flooded and two roads into town were impassable. He’d breathed a sigh of relief at the timing; the baby was safe and had been checked out, and Noah had what he’d needed to get through the night. The universe had been looking out for Noah lately.
They’d both survived that first night. While feeding the tiny infant, he’d realized he’d have to name her, and Annabel popped into his mind and that was that. He’d refused to let himself dwell on why.
Annabel Dawson. It wasn’t official anywhere, not yet, but he’d have to deal with that too—getting Annabel a birth certificate while worrying that some bureaucrat would demand he hand his baby over.
His baby.
How Noah had gotten from where he’d been the night he’d found Annabel to his baby rolling off his tongue with ease was anyone’s guess, but it had happened, and no one was more surprised than his sister. When the roosters had announced it was officially morning, he’d called his sister, Daisy, who lived out in Cheyenne, and boy, had she been in shock. She’d driven up by early evening and helped him so much—with Annabel and the ranch—the baby making her smile when he’d catch her looking so worried so often. Daisy had been close to five months pregnant then and wouldn’t say a word about who the father was. She’d seemed relieved to have a reason to move somewhere, even to the family ranch, with its tangled roots and all.
Up until the moment he’d found Annabel, he’d spent the four months prior rebuilding the Dawson Family Guest Ranch. That had changed him, turned him around, made him a better person and had to have something to do with how immediately responsible he’d felt for the baby left on his porch—his baby. Add that to a tiny finger clutching his pinkie while feeding her. Being up all hours of the night checking on her—sometimes just to make sure she was still breathing. Googling “lullabies newborns like” and then playing them, and then singing them himself while sitting in the rocker he’d gotten from the town swap shop. Changing diapers. Playing peekaboo. Reading the pertinent pages of Your Baby’s First Year and googling all the little things Annabel did that he wasn’t sure was normal. Like burping so loud from that tiny body.
During the past seven weeks, he and Annabel had gotten even closer with all the walking around the vast property of the ranch, the baby against his chest in the Snugli and cozy footie pajamas. He’d told her all about the history of the ranch—how his grandparents had built it fifty-two years ago, how popular it had once been with tourists and locals coming to relax out in the country, to hike or ride on the vast trails in the woods and open grasslands, to learn to ride a horse, shear a sheep, spin fleece into yarn, milk cows and goats, and make butter and yogurt and his grandmother’s award-winning ice cream, which she’d sold right in their own little shop in the main barn. Bess Dawson had always handed each of her grandchildren a little spoon and sample cup of her new flavors to make sure the ice cream passed the kid test, and every flavor always had. Noah could still taste his favorites: chocolate-chocolate chip, strawberry, Bear Ridge Mix—pistachio ice cream with peanuts. Noah had also told Annabel how his widowed father had destroyed it all within three years of inheriting the place, drinking and gambling away profits, savings, their legacy, his six kids eventually scattering across the West to get away from him.
Noah was the youngest and had been trapped there for a good bunch of those low years. Daisy, two years older, watched over him the best she could until she’d been driven away by their dad’s self-destruction when she was eighteen. Noah had also left the moment he’d become a legal adult, all his pleading to his father to get his act together going in one ear...
Ten years later, the Dawson Family Guest Ranch had been a ghost ranch, rarely mentioned anymore except for someone in town to shake their head over its demise. But with the money Noah and his siblings had invested, he and a hardworking crew had gotten the place in shape—albeit on a smaller scale than the original—in just five months so they could open Memorial Day weekend. The day after tomorrow, Friday, was the grand reopening. His brothers hadn’t responded to his invitation to stop by for the big day, and Noah wouldn’t be surprised when none showed up.
“Let the place go,” the Dawson siblings had all said to Noah one way or another at their father’s funeral.
Except Noah hadn’t been able to—and then his siblings had rallied around him, making a plan to invest in rebuilding because doing so meant something to him and would mean everything to their grandparents. Noah wouldn’t ever let the ranch go. For many reasons. So many reasons he hadn’t even told Annabel all of them yet. And he’d told her just about everything. His confidante was a seven-week-old, ten-pound, nine-ounce baby with chubby cheeks. There was a first for everything.
He heard a car coming up the drive and turned around. A silver Range Rover SUV was barreling up the dirt road toward the foreman’s cabin. Did he know anyone who drove a Range Rover? The eldest Dawson sibling, Ford, maybe. But Ford had also said hell would freeze before he’d step foot on the ranch again.
Whoever it was sure was in a hell of a hurry to get to the cabin.
One hand protectively on the back of Annabel’s head in the Snugli, he watched the SUV suddenly come to a dead stop halfway up the drive. The glare from the sun made it impossible to see who was behind the wheel. Why stop there?
The Range Rover suddenly started up again and inched forward, this time at two miles an hour.
When the SUV finally got within a few feet, he could see inside.
Holy hell.
Sara.
How long had it been? Almost two years. After she’d told him she was marrying Willem Perry—he could barely even think the name in his head without wanting to vomit or hit something—he’d then heard they’d moved out to Wellington, an affluent town an hour away. He hadn’t seen or heard from her since. He’d been close with Sara’s only living relative, her father, but Preston Mayhew had gotten very sick a few months before she’d married Willem. He’d also heard Sara had had her dad transferred from the county hospital to the state-of-the-art one in Wellington. Noah had once called about visiting hours and was told that all visitors had to be preapproved by Willem Perry. So much for that. It was better that
there was no one to talk to him about Sara or what she was up to or how great her life was with that bastard Willem; Noah wouldn’t have been able to bear it.
The car door opened and she stepped out, and his heart lurched. That wasn’t a surprise. The sight of Sara Mayhew had always had that effect. Not just because she was so pretty with her silky light brown hair and round, pale brown eyes; his attraction to her had always been about who she was, not how good she looked. Though she did look good.
She must have heard about the Dawson Family Guest Ranch reopening this weekend and decided to check the place out for herself. After all, she’d grown up here too.
“I can’t tell you how great it is to see you, Sara,” he said, surprising even himself with his honesty. But it was bursting out of him. He’d missed her so much the past couple of years that he’d done regretful things to forget her, nothing working.
She shut her car door and walked toward him, her gaze on the Snugli, then moving up to his face. “You found that baby on your porch seven weeks ago? The early-morning hours of April 9?” Her voice sounded strange. Desperate and shaky.
He stared at her, his grip a bit tighter on the baby carrier. “How did you know that?”
“Because Willem—my late husband—is the one who put her there. She’s mine, Noah. My daughter.”
What? Noah took a step toward Sara, then a step back. “There was a note with her. It said she’s mine.”
Sara shook her head. “She’s not yours. Willem told me she died during the home birth. But he just didn’t want her because she was a girl and frail-looking when her healthy, robust twin brother—the male heir—had been born two minutes earlier.”
No. That’s insanity. On what planet does that sound believable? Even the worst of the worst like Willem Perry wouldn’t do something like that. To his own flesh and blood? His newborn daughter?
For the Twins' Sake Page 2