by Raine Thomas
“In fact,” she said, “I’d appreciate you givin’ us some privacy. No offense.” Lifting her hands to the edges of the curtains hanging over the doors, she started tugging them closed. “Nice to meetcha,” she tossed through the doors before the curtains completely closed.
Jasmine stared blankly at her reflection in the glass. Embarrassment and anger waged war in her chest.
What could she do? It wasn’t like she could force her way into the house.
Her brain couldn’t fully process what had just happened. The one thought that snuck through was that she had food in her hands that wasn’t getting any fresher standing out in the mid-July heat. That finally got her moving, one foot in front of the other until she once again reached her car. She didn’t bother popping the trunk. Instead, she opened her door and reached over to put the bags on the passenger seat before getting behind the wheel.
Then she just sat there. That was where Gareth found her a few minutes later when he opened the door to the house and peered into the garage.
Spotting her through the passenger side window, he stepped into the garage and leaned down to smile and wave at her.
“Hi there, Miss Jasmine,” he said in his deep, cheerful voice. “Looks like you’re gonna make a fine meal tonight. You need some help carrying those bags next door?”
She burst into tears.
Somehow the kind man managed to finagle her out of the car and into a warm, comforting hug that only made her cry harder. He coaxed a shuddering and garbled explanation about the groceries out of her and seemed to get the gist. Keeping one of his arms around her shoulders, he led her into the house and sat her at the café table in his eat-in kitchen. Her tears multiplied when he thoughtfully placed a box of tissues in front of her. After making another trip out to collect the groceries and then putting the cold items in his fridge, he joined her at the table.
Rather than talk, he simply reached over and placed one of his large hands over hers on the table.
It took a while before she got herself back under control. She wasn’t generally a crier, but when that dam finally broke, it was an epic flood.
“I’m sorry,” she said when she could finally speak again. “I’ve interrupted your afternoon.”
“I’m retired,” he said with a gentle smile. “All you’re interrupting is the daily crossword I usually do while Althea volunteers at the church’s soup kitchen. I was stuck on forty-three down anyway.”
That prodded a watery laugh out of her.
“You want to talk about it?”
It felt like all she’d done lately was talk…with her family, with Alima, with her therapist. Still, the one person she wanted to talk to was so busy with Katie’s mother that he hadn’t even bothered to text Jasmine to tell her not to come over.
More hot tears stung her eyes. “Maybe I do,” she said.
“I saw some wine in the bags you brought. Would you like a glass?”
“Only if you’ll have one with me.”
“How ‘bout I have one of those beers?”
A couple minutes later, they moved into the home’s cozy sunroom with their drinks. Jasmine settled into the cushions of a wicker loveseat and took a few sips of her wine before she felt composed enough to engage in a conversation.
“This is good beer,” Gareth said when she remained quiet. “Were you celebrating something tonight?”
She shrugged. “Not really. I planned on talking to Will about a couple things.”
“Your relationship?”
“Yes, actually. And I wanted to share the news that I’m going to be opening a dance studio.”
His face broke into a wide smile. “Congratulations. That’s big news indeed.”
His enthusiasm helped ease some of the shadows from her heart. “Thank you. I’m excited about it. Like, really excited. It’s the first thing I’ve been this excited about since deciding to become a dancer when I was a little girl. I thought Will would be interested in hearing about it.”
“‘Course he would. So what happened to interrupt your plans?”
She took another large drink of her wine before replying, “Katie’s mother is next door.”
His bushy eyebrows lifted. “Carol Ann is in town?”
“Is that her name? Will hasn’t ever talked about her.”
The big man shifted, making his wicker chair creak. “You know I work with Katie in a therapeutic capacity,” he said with some apology in his tone, “so there are some things I can’t share with you.”
She nodded.
“That said, there are facts about Katie that are a matter of public record. Carol Ann Wilkins is her mother.”
“But Will has custody of Katie,” she said, remembering reading as much when she first researched him. “Carol Ann has no right to be here.”
He rubbed his beard before saying, “Parenting is a complicated business. There might be ten different reasons she could be there right now.”
The image of Carol Ann standing on the other side of the glass doors ran through her mind. Her lips trembled as more tears threatened.
“She was barefoot and drinking his beer. She said they’re over there getting reacquainted.”
His warm brown eyes seemed to observe what she didn’t say. “I’m sure that was an unpleasant surprise. But considering how you and Will met, I’d think you would understand the importance of not taking things at face value.”
“What do you mean, considering how we met?”
He drank more beer before replying, “I mean the two of you had a rocky start. You both made assumptions about each other during a brief interaction. How did you feel about him then?”
“I thought he was an overprotective ass.”
He smiled. “And how to you feel about him now?”
“I love him.”
The blurted admission, something she hadn’t even acknowledged to herself until that moment, had more tears spilling.
“Sure you do,” he said. “You wouldn’t be sitting here having a good cry right now otherwise. My point is that you should wait until you talk to Will before drawing any conclusions. I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation for all this.”
He was telling her everything she’d already tried to tell herself. Hearing it from him seemed to give it more power.
“I just wish he’d told me she was there,” she said. “I would have appreciated the consideration. It’s hard to think of building a future life with him when I feel so far on the outside of his current one.”
Gareth set his empty bottle on a side table and leaned toward her. “Maybe Will slipped up by not reaching out to you, but I’m sure there’s a good reason. This is just a little hiccup in the scheme of things. Now that you’re working so hard at rebuilding your future, you shouldn’t give up on it any easier than you did dancing.”
She found her first smile since pulling into his garage earlier. All of her uncertainty faded away, replaced by a renewed sense of purpose.
“Thanks, Gareth,” she said. “That’s exactly what I needed to hear.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Will hung up the phone and pressed his thumb and forefinger to his eyes in an effort to relieve the strain there. He’d had less than two hours of sleep over the past two days. He was approaching levels of exhaustion he hadn’t known existed. The last time he’d been this sleep-deprived was when Katie was struck by a forty-eight hour flu that kept them both contained to the bathroom for easy access to the toilet and cool baths.
He would cheerfully go back to sitting on a hard tile floor waiting for his daughter’s next dry heave if it meant he wouldn’t have to deal with the shit on his plate right now.
Carol Ann’s phone call had woken him up a mere hour after he’d fallen asleep beside Katie. He’d customized her ring tone and set it up to override his phone’s Do Not Disturb feature back when his life revolved around legal filings and court appearances. His attorney suggested it, advising the importance of having timely conversations rathe
r than exchanging voicemails to keep the custody process moving forward. It hadn’t occurred to him to switch the setting back once the legalities were settled.
He had answered the call purely out of instinct just to stop the noise. He wasn’t even sure what greeting he’d given when he brought the phone to his ear.
“Will, it’s Carol Ann,” she had said.
The grogginess had cleared in a snap, instantly replaced by adrenaline. Seeing Katie still asleep beside him, he had eased off the bed and hurried from the room, pulling the door closed behind him.
“Hi,” he said to buy his brain time to kick into gear.
He paused outside the bedroom to decide where to take the call. He didn’t want Katie to wake up and somehow overhear anything she shouldn’t. After a moment’s thought, he headed out to the family room. He’d be able to see her emerge from the bedroom from there.
Ryan glanced over at him from his post at the kitchen table. Will ignored him and sat on the sofa facing the main hallway.
“I know this is probably comin’ outta the blue,” she was saying in his ear.
That was an understatement. He hadn’t heard from her in more than eight months. He’d never expected to hear from her again.
“So much has happened,” she said. “I really need to see you and Katherine, and didn’t want to just show up out of the blue.”
His posture went rigid. “You can’t see Katie, Carol Ann.”
Either the words or his cold tone had made her pause. “No, of course. I’m gettin’ way ahead of myself. And I forgot that you call her Katie. I’m so sorry. Let me start this again.”
“I think it’s best that you go through my attorney,” he interrupted.
He heard the low murmur of Ryan’s voice in the background as she said, “I’m not tryin’ to step on your toes, Will. I wouldn’t dream of comin’ between you and Kath—Katie. What I’m tryin’ to do is make amends.”
He frowned. “Amends for what?”
“As part of my treatment.”
“Like in AA?”
“Lordy, no. I’m not an alcoholic. I was diagnosed with severe depression.”
“Depression?” he repeated, his overtaxed brain struggling to keep up with the conversation.
“Yeah. The doc thinks it started as postpartum and got worse when I didn’t see anyone about it. I’ve been on medication and in therapy for a while now.”
That had taken the edge off his gathering temper. “Oh.”
“The thing is, I’ve hit a point in my treatment where my therapist feels I won’t make progress without earnin’ forgiveness for my actions while I was sufferin’, especially with Katie. You know, leavin’ her with you like that.”
He had felt a headache building behind his eyes. “You’re not seeing Katie,” he repeated.
“That’s fine,” she hastily replied. “I mean it. I spoke outta turn before.” Her voice got softer. “But, Will, I feel this is important. Not just for me, but for Katie. Despite my mistakes, I’m still her mama. There will come a time where she wants to talk to me, even if it’s to yell and scream because of those mistakes. I’d like to start easin’ the way for that by mendin’ things between you and me. I know it’s a lot to ask. I’m puttin’ all my pride aside here. Would you even consider meetin’ with me for just a short while to talk about this face to face?”
The arguments he’d been building in his head while she talked flew out of his mind. “You’re here in Atlanta?”
“I’m in the area.” She let out a long breath. “I admit I considered showin’ up somewhere you’d be, hoping it’d be easier to get you to agree to talk to me about this. I’m sure you want to tell me no. If things were reversed, I’d’ve probably hung up the phone already. Thanks for listenin’ this long.”
He blamed that on his impaired mental function.
“I’ve taken what little time off I have from my job to travel here because this is so important to me,” she said. “I need to do this if I’m gonna make progress in my treatment.”
“It’s Katie’s progress I care about.”
“And well you should. That’s why I’m so happy she’s with you. You’re givin’ her the love and care I wasn’t capable of while I was sick.”
His brow furrowed. He knew depression was an illness, but he couldn’t help but feel she was trying to manipulate him by phrasing things that way.
In the end, she had pled her case for a few more minutes until he made a decision. He didn’t want to live with the possibility of Carol Ann showing up whenever she felt like it. By having this one conversation with her, he could get her out of his and Katie’s lives again.
“Where are you staying?” he had asked. “I can leave in a few hours to meet you.”
“I’m at my cousin’s house just outside Trenton, but I wouldn’t expect you to take that much time outta your day. It’d be four hours just for drive time back and forth. I’m happy to come out by you.”
“Fine. There’s a coffee shop down the road. We can meet there.”
After hanging up the phone, Will had tossed it to the side and leaned back against the sofa cushions, reaching up to run his hands over his face. Had he done the right thing by agreeing to this meeting? Or was he making a huge mistake?
He needed to talk to his dad.
“I thought you’d be dead to the world by now,” his dad had greeted him over the phone.
“Carol Ann called.”
There’d been a noticeable pause before his dad asked, “Did you call Sharon?”
Sharon Boaz was Will’s family law attorney. “No, I called you. She just wanted—”
“I don’t give a damn what she wanted. You need to call Sharon. I’m wrapping up with the inspector now. I’ll get Julio on my next appointment. I’ll be home in thirty or forty minutes.”
“Thanks.”
The phone went dead. Will looked over when Ryan approached.
“I think you should meet with her here,” Ryan said without preamble.
Of course the specialist had been listening. It wasn’t like Will had tried to keep the conversation private. Ryan’s comment still felt invasive.
“I don’t want her in our home.”
Ryan sat on the arm of the easy chair facing him. “That’s understandable. But here, we control the environment. We can install cameras and microphones so if anything you say is ever called into question, you’ll have the truth on record.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“There are ways to make her aware of recording devices without putting her guard up, which is key in situations like these.” When Will didn’t respond, he said, “You should know Ordinem conducted a standard run on Ms. Wilkins at the onset of my service to you. She was telling the truth about the depression. She’s been receiving treatment for nearly a year.”
Will had pondered that. “That must’ve been why the depression wasn’t mentioned during the legal proceedings. She didn’t know about it.”
“That seems to be the case. Ms. Wilkins hired a friend for her legal representation, one who had only recently passed the bar exam. If she had hired someone with more experience who didn’t know her so well, they would likely have insisted on a court-ordered psych eval based on her atypical behavior.”
Will supposed it made him a terrible person to be glad about that. Things would have been much more entangled if Carol Ann had known she was sick. Instead, she did everything she could to push full custody to him.
“She just wants to tell me her side of things,” he said, still not comfortable with secretly recording their meeting.
Ryan had folded his hands and rested them on his thigh in a way that read, Okay, let’s try this another way.
“In the course of my investigation into Ms. Wilkins, I also learned that Katie isn’t her only child.”
“What?”
“Ms. Wilkins grew up near the Single-A stadium where you two first met. She started hanging around the ballplayers who played there when she was fourteen. Sh
e got pregnant the first time at fifteen. She received money for the baby in a private adoption.”
“How did I not hear about this before now?”
“The adoption was closed, meaning the records were sealed. It would have taken more than a basic search to uncover it, and from what I understand, your petition for custody was uncontested. There was little reason for your attorney to look deeper than she did.”
Will had just stared at him until he continued.
“Ms. Wilkins repeated the same thing with another player the following year, giving birth to that baby when she was seventeen, and again received money for the baby in a private adoption. The following year, she met you.”
Will closed his eyes over his own stupidity.
“For reasons we can only guess, she had a change of heart with Katie. Katie was her first girl, so maybe that weighed in. It may also have been that because she was nineteen when Katie was born and could legally make her own decisions, she thought she could raise the child on her own. In none of the cases did our research show that she attempted to contact the baby’s fathers before they were born.”
Will had to know. “What did you learn about Katie’s upbringing?”
“As far as we can determine without a much deeper look, Ms. Wilkins did as well as she could. She worked at the local supermarket to provide for her and Katie. She had the support of her family and local members of the community. There are standard records with a pediatrician for Katie’s first three well visits.”
“Three?”
Ryan had hesitated. “It appears Ms. Wilkins’ depression interfered with her ability to focus on Katie’s care sometime between when Katie turned three and when she turned four. There isn’t much we can determine beyond that. Katie wasn’t in school and didn’t see any other professionals who would have kept records.”
Will had weighed all of that in silence. Carol Ann had mentioned “mistakes,” and he’d wondered about the plural form of the word. Now that he knew about the other babies she’d given up, it made more sense. She had undoubtedly led a hard life.
“Why do you think we should record this meeting?” he had asked at last.