A Father's Secret

by Yvonne Lindsay

  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.

  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.

  Nothing and no one is irreplaceable. The words echoed in her mind as if James were in the room with her now. It was something he’d always said whenever they’d lost a valued staff member. And he’d been right. Even as her heart argued that this was different—she was Riley’s mother, for goodness’ sake!—her head knew that on paper it made little difference. She’d been a surrogate. She’d given birth to another couple’s child.

  It was unbearable. It was a mistake that should never, ever have been made. She’d thought her life couldn’t sink any lower, that things couldn’t possibly get worse, but she’d been so very wrong. Through vision blurred with the tears that continued to fall, she looked through the balance of the papers, identifying a visitation document and another one entitled Settlement Agreement.

  A settlement? What on earth? She flicked through the papers and began to feel her grief become sharper, even more agonizing, as it blended with pure fury when she saw the terms that Sam was proposing. In a nutshell, he wanted to pay her a million dollars, in full and final payment and in gratitude for carrying his son and providing for him in the first six months of his life. Provision was being made to give her time to wean Riley onto formula before he was handed over to his father.

  One word leaped from the page, searing itself against the back of her eyes. Gratitude? Erin clenched her jaw and swallowed hard. He was grateful she’d given him a son to take home and love and raise? How dare he reduce her arduous, joyful, life-changing months of motherhood to nothing more than a service provided by a paid employee? She carefully put the papers down on the table, fighting the urge to rip them into shreds.

  A million dollars? Is that what Sam thought a child was worth? He was paying her for his son? No. No way. How dare he? How could he put a price on a life? On what she’d gone through? On what she was losing—what he was taking from her?

  She pushed herself up to her feet so rapidly her chair fell, bouncing on the tiled floor. Grabbing the cordless phone she dialed Janet’s number, feeling as if she was holding on to her sanity by no more than a thread.

  Janet wasn’t available but Erin was able to make an appointment to see her the next day. When she hung up, she sat down again and read every paper through, over and over, until she felt she understood every last word.

  She couldn’t fight his claim for full custody but she could hold some power here. It was the only power she had left.

  Fifteen

  “What do you mean she won’t accept the money? Why? Isn’t it enough? Is she asking for more?” Sam raged through his phone.

  “I mean, she won’t accept the money. Any money.”

  David’s cool clear voice sounded absurdly rational in light of the information he’d just disclosed.

  “She has to.”

  The words sounded about as lame and redundant as Sam felt right now.

  “Actually, no. She doesn’t. Her only request is for an extra two weeks for weaning the child.”

  “Riley. His name is Riley.”

  “But you’ll be changing that, right? Didn’t you and Laura have a different name picked out?”

  Sam squeezed the phone so tight the plastic squeaked. “No, I won’t be changing his name. And I am going to do my best to change Erin’s mind about the money.”

  “Well, good luck on that, Sam. From what her lawyer has said, she’s pretty adamant.”

  Sam ended the call and paced the confines of his high-rise office overlooking Union Square. The question “why?” echoed back and forth in his head. She’d made no counteroffer on the custody bid, she’d ignored the visitation rights and she’d refused the settlement. What the hell was going on? He, probably better than most, knew she couldn’t afford to refuse the money.

  He stopped in front of the window, staring down at the people rushing about their busy lives out on the street, on the beggars and homeless people who dotted the pavement here and there. Would any one of them refuse an offer of a million dollars? No, of course not. No rational person would.

  He had to see her. To talk to her. To talk some sense into her. He knew her background. He’d read the report from the investigator. She’d grown up with little more than ill-fitting clothing and the bruises on her back. Subsequent to that had come a history of running away from home, substance abuse and the list of petty crimes she’d been picked up for.

  After the baby from the squat house died, she’d made a conscious and massive effort to distance herself from her past and to clean herself up. To improve her life and to build a new one filled with all that she’d had a right to before, but had never been given.

  Sam had read the report and been drowned in shame. He’d been prepared to tar her with the same brush as the police officers who’d investigated the infant’s death. But they hadn’t known her. He did. Anger and heartbreak had blinded him when they’d fought after bringing Riley home from the emergency doctor, but once that anger had cooled, he’d had to admit that she truly was the kind, capable, loving woman he’d come to know over the past few months.

  He finally understood why she’d been so determined to hold on to it all. Been prepared to lie about Riley’s paternity to keep their home. He’d gone through the wringer the past few weeks, and his early anger had settled down to a slow burn, but all that was nothing compared to what he knew she must be feeling now. He made a decision. He was going to Connell Cove and he wasn’t coming back until Erin agreed to allow him to ensure that she was financially secure.

  He crossed back to his desk and picked up his phone to talk to his executive assistant.

  “Julia, get me on the next flight to Lake Tahoe, I don’t care which airport, just whichever one leaves soonest. If there are no commercial flights then charter one. And make sure there’s a rental car there for me, too.”

  “A rental car? Did you want a driver?”

  “No, I’ll be driving myself.”

  “Are you sure, Sam?”

  He ruthlessly quelled the instinctive thrust of fear that pushed from the back of his mind. “Absolutely certain.”

  “Okay, then.”

  He waited about ten minutes until she called him back with the details. He didn’t even head back to his apartment for a change of clothes, instead getting Ray to take him straight out to the airport. One way or another, he’d settle this with Erin Connell before the night was out.

  * * *

  It had been the week from hell, knowing each time she nursed Riley it was taking her one step closer to the last time, and ultimately, the day she would have to say goodbye to him. For good. She’d ignored the visitation rights that Sam’s lawyer had included in the documents. She knew in her heart it was better this way. Better than only seeing Riley for a few short hours every few weeks. Knowing such torture would probably be even more painful than not seeing him at all. She simply couldn’t face having to walk away from him each time, knowing someone else was loving him, raising him into boyhood, then manhood. Someone who wasn’t her.

  She’d put Riley to bed for the night a little wh
ile ago. For some reason, tonight it had been hard to actually put him down and walk away, leaving him to settle into slumber. All she’d wanted to do these past days was hold him and never let him go.

  Maybe it had been the confirmation from the trustees of the property that the land and house would be signed over to the State on the same date she had agreed to hand over custody of Riley. It was as if every tie to her happiness would be severed at once. She’d considered putting a proposal together to the trustees, to be put forward to whichever organization would be managing the property, appointing her as caretaker. But then she’d changed her mind.

  She couldn’t bear to think of living the next few years in the place that had seen both the beginning, and the death, of all her dreams. It would be hard to leave here, incredibly hard, because even with the sadness that had been borne out of the past few months, there had been so many good, strong memories. But living here would be so much harder with every second of every day filled with memories of Riley and of what might have been.

  Erin was going into the kitchen to make herself a cup of herbal tea, when she heard a vehicle on the driveway outside. Instead of stopping at the front entrance, it came down the side and pulled up outside the kitchen door. She looked at the clock, and saw that it was nearly eight o’clock. She certainly wasn’t expecting anyone this late, but only her friends came round the back like that.

  The slam of the car door echoed outside. She strained her ears and heard the uneven, heavy tread of footsteps coming toward the house. Her heart skipped a beat. She only knew one person, one man, who walked like that. Sam. Her hand fluttered to her throat.

  What was he doing here? Surely he hadn’t reneged on the deal giving her the extra weeks with Riley. He was going to have him for the rest of his life, for goodness’s sake. What was an extra fourteen days in the scheme of things? Had she missed something in the legal jargon?