by Valery Parv
How could she argue with his logic? She should probably be glad he had the strength to call a halt before things got too far out of hand, but at some level she knew it was already too late. What she felt had nothing to do with gratitude. "Do you expect me to thank you for saving me from myself?" she asked, proud that her voice shook only a little.
He dropped his arm to his side and stepped back, making it obvious that the moment of abandonment was over. His voice was frigid as he said, "I don't expect anything from you at all." He handed her the folder of notes the publisher had prepared and held the door open. "We're done here."
Anger whipped through her for allowing herself to be swept up in his kiss to the point of forgetting why she was angry with him. His comment reminded her. "Not quite," she said acidly. "I looked for you at the paper earlier."
"Why do I think you didn't want to compliment me on my work?"
"Because I don't. What you wrote in today's column may have cost Model Children an important donor."
He frowned. "I didn't identify your charity specifically."
"The donor read between the lines."
"Then I'll have to choose my words more carefully in the future. I didn't intend you any harm."
But harm was what he had done her, she thought as she closed the door between them, knowing she wasn't thinking only of the children's charity.
* * *
Chapter 5
« ^ »
"How does it feel, knowing you're a father but being denied the chance to raise your child?"
As he put the question to his interview subject and braced himself to hear the heart-wrenching answer, Zeke knew he was also asking it of himself. The answer was more complicated than he could have imagined. If he'd known that Tara was carrying his child, he knew he would have stayed in Australia. Not because she couldn't cope without him—hadn't she done just that? But he hated to think of her doing it.
For a moment he pictured her in the full flower of pregnancy, imagining how her delicate skin must have bloomed with color as her model figure slowly ripened to a different kind of beauty. He ached inside, knowing he would never see her like that, or splay his hand across her fecund belly and feel the ripple of movement as his child quickened inside her. He hadn't had to deal with the loss, either, but that was a deprivation of sorts, cheating him of his right to mourn, as well.
The man seated across the table from him screwed up his face as if he was fighting tears. Zeke knew how he felt. After confronting Tara, he had felt close to breaking point himself. It was no small effort to keep his emotions under control now.
It didn't change facts. He was a father.
His son, Brendan, had been born while he was thousands of miles away and he hadn't known a thing about it. He wasn't vain enough to think being with her would have changed the outcome, but at least he could have held his son as Tara had done. They could have cried together, healed together. How was he supposed to forgive her for denying him that chance?
Now he found himself wondering if his real father had known about his own birth? He had always believed that the man had walked away from his responsibilities, but what if Zeke's mother had never told him about his son? Never given him the chance to meet Zeke, denying them both the chance to know each other, as Tara had been prepared to do.
Pointless to agonize over what might have been, he told himself, but the thought burned inside him like a prank birthday candle that keeps relighting itself after it's blown out. Had his birth father been as much a victim of his mother's scheming as Zeke himself?
Had he known of his son's existence, would his natural father have made a home for him? It would have saved Zeke from being moved in and out of a string of foster homes, making attachments and being wrenched away until he was too gun-shy to trust anymore. Zeke knew the thought was impossibly idealistic. Things may well have turned out exactly the same. The hell of it was, he would never know.
His mother, the one person who could have filled in the gaps, had refused to discuss her relationship with his father, suggesting that Zeke was better off without him. Now she was gone and Zeke's efforts over the years had yielded no more information.
He would also never know how things would have worked out between him and Tara if he had been different. He had another vision of them together, holding hands across a baby's crib, a dark-haired infant kicking and squealing between them, and he felt an abyss open up inside him.
He had always sensed the darkness lurking within him, the shadowy places that had remained unfilled when he was a child, until he no longer trusted anyone but himself to fill them. With her generous nature and open heart, Tara had come closer than anyone to filling the emptiness. For a while she had made him hope that things could be different. Then she had pushed him away just like all the rest, her betrayal infinitely worse because he had allowed her to touch parts of his soul that he had shielded from all others.
He had come closer to loving Tara than any other human being. Perhaps without fully acknowledging it, especially not to himself, he had loved her. Part of him still hungered for the completion she represented. Why else would he have insisted on putting himself through that meeting with her? It had been a mistake to think he could stay uninvolved, and he had told Colin so when his new partner returned to the office. Colin had been disappointed, but had agreed to take over the contract negotiations with her. Zeke hated to think of Tara meeting with any other man, even on business, but it was safer than the alternative.
Remembering how he had nearly made love to her in Colin's office, he almost broke out in a cold sweat. Thank goodness he'd had the strength to pull back while he still could. It didn't stop his body responding automatically to the thought of her, the arousal strong enough to make him want to seek her out right now and finish what they'd started.
He was horrified at himself. He might hate what she'd done to him, but it didn't prevent primitive need from clawing at him, so hot and urgent that it threatened to stop him from doing his job. He had never allowed anything to do that, until now.
"How does anyone handle this?" He massaged his temples with stiff fingers, aware of an ache behind his eyes that refused to go away.
Across from him, his subject gave him a gratified look he didn't deserve. "That's it exactly. You do understand. My wife was afraid you wouldn't."
Zeke pulled himself back to the interview with a jolt, thankful that his miniature tape recorder whirred away between them, making up for his lapse in concentration. In his turbulent state of mind, he thought it safer not to trust his usually reliable memory. Now he found the man's admission intriguing. "What did your wife think I'd be like?"
The man looked down at the table. "She said you're too tough and streetwise to understand our feelings. Us and the other parents whose children were supposed to have died but were given to other people for money. As you said, how are we supposed to live with that?"
Zeke felt ashamed of being credited with more compassion than was his due, but an admission, while soothing his conscience, would only inflict further pain so he held it back. In truth, he hadn't really understood how the parents felt until Tara told him about Brendan. The resulting empathy had little to recommend it in his book, and he could do without having his gut twisted into knots as he worked on the story. Cool objectivity was far easier to handle, but it was denied him now.
"No one should have to suffer what you're going through," he said, not sure whether he was speaking for himself or the other man.
The man slammed a fist onto the table, rattling the coffee cups. "If you hadn't begun to investigate what really happened…"
"Strictly speaking, you should be thanking the father who came to me with his suspicions," Zeke interjected.
The man clenched his fists. "But you listened to him when nobody else would. The police and hospital authorities told him grief for his lost child was making him imagine things."
Zeke nodded. "I admit I had my own doubts when he told me how his wife had gone back
to the hospital as an outpatient, and found herself sitting next to a woman with a new baby she swore was her child."
The man scrubbed his eyes. "It's easy to make yourself see what you want to see. After our little Clair died, I kept seeing her everywhere. I told myself I was imagining things. But it might not have been imagination."
Zeke inclined his head. "The other woman was so convinced she was right that she went home and forced herself to examine the photograph her husband had taken of their supposedly lost baby. Until then she hadn't been able to face it. This time she made herself study it more closely, and what she saw horrified her."
"It wasn't her baby in the photo, was it?" the man asked, sounding ragged.
Zeke couldn't blame him for his emotional state. The couples on Zeke's list must have been to hell and back a thousand times since Zeke started the investigation. "She says it isn't. She swears that the baby's hair color and eye shape were different from the child she gave birth to. Before the child could move or cry, the midwife whisked it away, ostensibly to begin resuscitation, although there had been no warning that the baby was in difficulty."
This was hard, when Zeke's imagination kept turning the baby into a boy called Brendan. He cleared his throat. "The mother was told that efforts to revive her baby hadn't worked. She was allowed to hold the child and say goodbye. She only saw her living child briefly, but she swears that the baby the midwife brought back to her was a different child. It seems she tried to alert someone at the time, but it was dismissed as the hysteria of grief."
He took a deep breath. "I'm still digging, but it looks as if her baby was switched for one who died close to the time her baby was born."
"Why didn't her baby cry, if it was healthy?" the man asked.
Zeke had asked himself the same question, answering it during his research. "Not all newborn babies do at first. Some have to be stimulated to take the first breath. The midwife could have pretended that the child wasn't breathing when, in reality, all it needed was a good smack on the behind. She could then rush it away, supposedly to care for it, but in reality to make the exchange.
"It seems likely there were variations on this scenario," he added. "I interviewed one couple who say their child was fine for the first couple of days, then deteriorated overnight." The sleight of hand and the heartbreak involved made Zeke feel sick to his stomach, but he had seen enough in his line of work to know that some people were capable of anything if the price was right.
"You think their child was switched for an ailing baby that had been born to someone else, someone wealthy enough to pay for a healthy baby?"
"Allegedly ailing," Zeke corrected automatically. "My informant at the hospital was secretly gathering DNA records to prove that at least two babies were switched at birth or soon afterward, and given to couples willing to pay the asking price. My informant is sure there were more, but the records have been conveniently mislaid or deleted. Until they're located, we won't know how many babies were involved, or where they ended up."
The man's bright gaze bored into Zeke. "How do you know it didn't happen the way we were told? Babies do die at birth, or get something wrong with them afterward."
Zeke linked his hands under the table to stop them from shaking. It had happened to his own son. "I know, but the pattern is what bothers me here. I've uncovered at least four cases where parents either doubt the identity of a baby who died, or had a child who was healthy at first, then took a sudden turn for the worse. It's beyond coincidence, especially when the same group of people seem to be involved on each occasion."
He didn't add that his source inside the hospital was feeding him information scrap by scrap. His informant was a low-ranking employee whom no one suspected of having enough pieces of the puzzle to be able to put it together, but she had. She told Zeke she was too afraid to go to the authorities but when Zeke started nosing around, prompted by the father who had approached him, she had agreed to help Zeke, provided he kept her name out of the story altogether. He didn't blame her for being frightened. People who would barter children's lives for cash were presumably capable of anything.
As a result, she would only meet him for minutes at a time and kept her information frustratingly cryptic, wanting him to work things out for himself so nothing could be traced back to her. It made the going tough, but Zeke had never backed away from a challenge when a story was involved. If it held up, this one could well be the biggest of his career.
His interview subject reclaimed his attention by reaching a hand across the table to him. "You really think there's a chance our baby's still alive? We were told she died soon after birth, and my wife was too heartbroken to ask to see her. For her sake, I didn't insist. Now I wish I had."
"If we're right, it probably wouldn't have made any difference."
The man's features contorted. "These people have to be stopped."
"I think they've already stopped. According to figures I've been shown, the infant mortality rate at that hospital took a dive a month after your baby was born, so either new security procedures were put in place, or the people involved decided to call it quits to avoid drawing any more suspicion."
"Too late to help our baby and the others like her." The man's voice caught on tears. "How can anyone sell an innocent life?"
Zeke leaned across the table. "In my experience, anything's for sale if you have the money. For now, I want you to remember that whoever has your baby wanted her enough to risk a great deal for her. They aren't likely to harm her."
It was small consolation, but the man pulled himself together with an obvious effort. "I won't rest until I know what really happened and get my daughter back. Until you uncovered this scandal, we accepted that our baby was gone. The grieving was hard enough. Now, to think Clair might be living with some other family, not knowing she's our child, is beyond bearing. You're our only hope to put this thing right."
Zeke met the man's troubled gaze with a direct one of his own. "I'm no superhero, but if I possibly can, I will see justice done for you and the children."
"Thank you." The man's voice cracked and he stood up. "I'd better get back to my wife. The waiting is killing her."
Zeke wished he could offer the man more hope, but he couldn't. He was doing everything in his power to find the answers that would give the man and his wife and the other parents like them peace of mind.
The man stopped and turned, his eyes shining. "Find our baby, please."
Zeke nodded in silence, knowing he had the masthead for his story. Find Our Baby, Please would tear at hearts around the country. It was tearing at his own, he acknowledged as he drained his cup of strong, black coffee.
After Tara's heart-wrenching account of how she had cradled their child's lifeless body, he held no hope that his son was among those the ring of hospital employees had allegedly placed with new families in return for vast sums of money, so he wasn't doing this for himself. But Tara's revelation somehow made it more personal. It wouldn't bring his son back to life, but it might save other children from the hell he had endured, not knowing who they were or where they really belonged. Pocketing the tape recorder, he stood up. Time to start finding answers—and babies.
* * *
"Why do you keep all this stuff?" Tara asked her mother as she opened yet another carton filled with memorabilia from her childhood. It hurt to think that this was the last time she would help clean out this attic. Her mother had decided to sell the old family home and move to a smaller place. Her father was now living in an apartment near the beach, and had declined an invitation to participate, saying there was nothing he wanted from the attic.
Several cartons of toys that had belonged to Tara and her brother already stood to one side, along with clothes and other items to be donated to charity. A rocking horse and toy car would go to Tara's niece and nephew.
Lillian McNiven gave her daughter a faraway look. "Hanging on to this stuff is like hanging on to your babies, in a way. Giving it up means accepting that they a
ren't your babies any longer. When you have children of your own, you'll understand."
Tara sat back, fighting the urge to wrap her arms around herself and rock mindlessly. She had never told her parents she was pregnant, and her mother's words flooded her with desolation. Brendan should have inherited these things, she raged inwardly, not sure who or what her anger was directed at, but barely able to contain it.
"Don't look so sad. It isn't the end of the world," Lillian said softly, touching a hand to her daughter's face. "They're only things. You still have your memories."
Tara nestled against her mother's hand. Her parents had separated during Tara's pregnancy, and Tara hadn't wanted to add to her mother's burden. Fortunately, her mother had gone away for a few months after the breakup, otherwise there was no way Tara could have kept the truth to herself.
"All the same, it's hard letting go of a baby," Tara said in a strangled whisper.
It was Lillian's turn to look puzzled. "That's an odd way to put it. What are you trying to say?"
A lump lodged in Tara's throat. "It wasn't you I was thinking about just now, it was myself."
"I still don't understand."
Tara knew that now was the time. "I was thinking of my own baby. I didn't tell you, because he was born at the time you and Dad were having so much difficulty. Then the baby died at birth, and there was no point saying anything."
"Oh, Tara, my poor child. I knew something was different about you, but I was so caught up in my own problems, it never occurred to me that you could be pregnant. Zeke was the father, wasn't he?"
Tara nodded. "There was no one else."
Lillian smiled wanly. "You were drawn to him like a magnet to metal from first meeting. Was the baby the reason you two broke up?"
"Good heavens, no. He never knew."
Lillian looked shocked. "You never told Zeke? Oh, Tara, you didn't have to go through the whole experience alone. I wish you had told me."
"Zeke had his dream job offer and you had so much to cope with already. It seemed unfair to burden you with my problem."