“One of Mom’s favorite sayings is ‘the more the merrier.’” A breeze ticked up, ruffling Aiden’s hair. “It explains why she adopted all three of us. I was wondering...can you stick around for a few more minutes?”
“I—” Should say no. Just. Say. No. Maddie.
“Please. I need to talk to you about something.” Aiden fished around in his pocket and drew out the keys to the UTV. “In private.”
He’d had to use the word please.
Maddie glanced at the house. If the topic of the conversation was something Aiden didn’t want his family to overhear, it would explain the subtle change Maddie detected in his mood.
Now she was curious and concerned.
“All right.”
Dodger was waiting for them, sitting patiently next to the passenger side of the side-by-side.
“Really?” Aiden scooped the dog up and set him in the middle of the seat. “We need to talk about this strange attachment you have to my UTV.”
Maddie suppressed a smile. Aiden would probably deny it, but she suspected it was the man, not the machine, Dodger was getting attached to.
She waited until Aiden stowed his crutch in the back before turning the key in the ignition. “Where are we going?”
He pointed up the driveway. “That way.”
An actual road Maddie could handle. She was also secretly relieved they weren’t going anywhere near the shed where Aiden’s brothers had stashed his pickup truck.
Maddie drove past the workshop keeping a light foot on the gas in an attempt to keep the dust down and her passengers from bouncing out of the vehicle.
Right before the wooden bridge, Aiden pointed to the left.
All Maddie saw were trees and more trees. And maybe—if she squinted—a narrow space between them.
“So...you want me to take the invisible trail into the woods now?”
His low laugh went right through Maddie and wound around her heart. Twice. “Right.”
“That’s what I thought.” She obediently turned in that direction, even though everything inside her was clambering to return to the safety of her apartment.
The sun simmered low in the clouds, painting the sky with delicate brushstrokes of apricot, rose and lavender that reminded Maddie of the illustrations in the Winter books.
Aiden had said he wanted to talk to her about something, but apparently he was content to wait until they reached their destination.
The terrain began to change, and a quarter mile into the woods, the fleeting patches of indigo Maddie glimpsed between the trees told her they were getting closer to the river again.
And then the trail completely disappeared.
Maddie tapped the brake and looked at Aiden for direction.
“We have to go the rest of the way on foot,” he said.
Maddie searched Aiden’s face, but the man who loved to joke around looked totally serious.
On foot. And Aiden didn’t seem to care that only one of his was in top working condition.
“It’s not far.” Aiden’s crooked smile told Maddie he’d read her mind. He scooped up Dodger and set the dog on the ground. “Do you see that fallen tree over there?”
Maddie saw a lot of them, but knowing Aiden, he meant the giant white pine stretched out over the river. The trunk was partially submerged in water, and the massive web of roots erupting from the ground rose almost as high as the wall she and the teenagers had built for The Pendulum.
“Is this part of the course?” Maddie kept a watchful eye on Aiden as they slowly picked their way through the brush.
“It’s just a place I like to go. To think.” He lifted a branch with the end of his crutch, holding it in place so Maddie could duck underneath it. “I haven’t been able to get here for a while.”
Maddie’s favorite thinking place was the velvet wingback chair in her apartment, but this...this was nice, too. Dodger must have agreed, because his tail began to wag as he limped toward the water.
The current had slowed here, and the reeds growing in the shallow water performed a synchronized ballet to the melody of the river.
“Take a seat.” Aiden motioned toward the fallen tree. The elements had hollowed out the center, creating a natural bench where a person—Maddie’s breath caught in her lungs when Aiden squeezed in beside her—or two could sit down.
“Cold?”
Maddie’s lungs stopped working completely when Aiden stripped off his flannel shirt, leaving a T-shirt behind, and draped it around her shoulders, adding another layer of protection against the falling temperatures.
It was as if the wilderness—sunshine and fresh air and the tangy scent of pine—had been woven into the fabric. The heat from Aiden’s body had warmed it, too, which should have reduced the number of goose bumps on Maddie’s arms, not quadrupled them.
She was comfortable with silence—the presence of an attractive man like Aiden, not so much.
If they’d been somewhere else, the intimacy of the quiet setting would have felt like a date.
Madeline Rose. Get a grip.
“You wanted to talk to me about something?” she prompted, to remind herself that Aiden had had a specific purpose for bringing her here.
“I had an enlightening conversation with my brothers last night. It turns out Brendan’s memory was a little faulty. Not the conversation he overheard, but when it took place.” A quiet exhale stirred the air. “That means the timeline I gave you for our sister’s birthday is wrong, too.”
Maddie listened as Aiden relayed the details.
“I guess it’s my fault, for taking so many trips to the ER,” he joked.
Maddie saw right through his attempt at humor. The more time she spent with Aiden, the more she realized his lighthearted responses weren’t meant to draw attention. He used humor to deflect it. As a shield to hide his emotions.
Finding his sister without a name or a birth date already seemed like an impossible task, and Aiden didn’t want to fail.
“I emailed several adoption agencies and asked for general information about closed adoptions,” Maddie told him. “I wanted to know more before I offered any details about your situation.”
“Brendan and Liam are worried she doesn’t want to be found, but maybe she doesn’t know she has a family who’s looking for her,” Aiden said.
Maddie struggled to find the words that would encourage Aiden not to lose hope.
“We don’t know where your sister is, but God does. The timeline is off, but we can trust His timing.”
Aiden looked away, jaw settling into a hard line, fingers curling into fists at his side.
The posture of a child resisting the comfort of his father’s arms, not leaning on him for strength.
“I thought I had the trust thing down, but...” Aiden stopped. Shook his head. “It sounds stupid. After seeing my truck, I know I should be grateful to be alive, but I can’t help but wonder why—”
“He didn’t spare you from the whole thing?”
* * *
Maddie’s words, though softly spoken, landed like a punch to Aiden’s gut.
He swung around to face her again, but the deepening shadows hid her expression from view. “How did you know that?”
“I don’t think you’re the only one who’s asked that question when something bad happened in their life.”
True. But something in Maddie’s voice told Aiden she was remembering a specific situation. “What happened to you?”
He felt, rather than saw, her surprise.
“I had heart surgery after I was born,” Maddie finally said. “Two of them, actually. I was in and out of the hospital while I was growing up, and my parents steered me toward activities that wouldn’t put my health at risk.”
“Like books.”
“Like books,” Maddie agreed. “I understood
why Mom and Dad were so protective, but when I had to watch everyone doing the things I couldn’t do, I got angry with God. I wanted to fit in but I felt...invisible. The odd girl out who really was odd. Everyone else in my class had perfect hearts. Why wasn’t mine perfect? Didn’t God care about me as much as He cared about them?”
Aiden’s stomach tightened. Maddie did understand how he was feeling. The same dark thought had run through his mind more than once in the past few weeks.
“But you don’t feel like that anymore.”
“There are times I do.” Maddie’s quiet admission stunned him. “But I don’t want to be the person who says, If God loves me, then... And I fill in the blank with what I want or think I should have. I want to be the one who drops the if and says, God loves me, so... His plan is always better than mine. Always for my good.”
Aiden flinched. A lot of the conversations rolling around inside his head lately had started with the word if.
“My situation didn’t change but my attitude did,” Maddie went on. “I started focusing on the things I could do instead of what I couldn’t. I spent so much time in the high school library, people assumed I worked there and started asking me for help.” She paused and a hint of mischief tugged at the corners of her lips. “It must have been the geeky glasses. Anyway, it opened a door for a job after graduation, and when Mrs. Whitman retired, the city hired me to take her place.”
Aiden wanted to tell Maddie there was nothing geeky about her glasses. He also wanted to tell her that she was wrong. The heart that Maddie claimed wasn’t perfect was the same one that drew people like Tyler and Justin and Skye in.
She’d graduated a year behind him, but Aiden had no memory of Maddie in high school. Not because she’d been invisible, like she’d claimed, but because he’d been an idiot.
He should have hung out at the library more.
“But you’re okay now, right?” Aiden tried to imagine Maddie surviving two major surgeries as an infant. “The doctors fixed your heart?”
The split second of silence that followed caused a sudden spike in Aiden’s pulse.
“The surgery was a success,” she finally said. “But I can’t...put too much strain on it.” Maddie shifted a little, opening up a space between them. “We should probably go back.”
“Go back?” Aiden had had a goal in mind when he’d asked Maddie to take him to the river, but now he didn’t want the evening to end. “Why?”
“The sun is going down. It’s going to be dark soon.”
“The moon will take over.” Aiden stretched his legs out, crossed his arms behind his head and made himself more comfortable. “And if necessary, we can use your fleece jacket to find our way home.”
Aiden heard an indignant little sniff. “It’s not that bright.”
“Oh. It is.”
“But—”
“Listen.” Short of tossing him into the UTV and making a break for the house, Aiden figured that Maddie was stuck with him for a while. The red squirrel that sounded the alarm when Dodger had dared to venture into its territory had scuttled away, and the breeze had died down so even the leaves no longer whispered in the trees. “Do you hear that?”
Maddie tipped her head. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Exactly.” Aiden exhaled a low laugh. “In the city, you can see the moon, but the artificial light takes over. When we moved here, I couldn’t believe there were this many stars. I’d sneak out at night when everyone else was asleep and lie on my back in the grass and stare up at the Milky Way for hours.”
“That’s the Andromeda Galaxy.” Maddie’s teeth sank into her lower lip, the gesture followed by a quick, sideways glance to see if she’d offended him.
Aiden chuckled. “Someone paid attention in science class.”
Maddie smiled up at the shimmering puddle of light overhead. Surrounded by droplets of silver, it looked as if someone had accidentally tipped over a bucket of stars. “How Far is a Star?”
“I have no idea.” Aiden’s lips quirked. “Because I was the one who didn’t pay attention in class.”
“It’s the title of one of my favorite books when I was little,” Maddie said. “I checked it out of the library so many times that Mrs. Whitman finally told me to keep it and ordered a new copy. Pegasus got lost and had to work his way through all the constellations to find his way home.”
“You remember the plot?”
“I told you I was odd.”
Not odd. Pretty amazing.
“Whenever I cracked open a book, the words seemed to move around the page,” Aiden told her. “It took so much effort to bring them back into focus, I stopped trying. My teachers always wrote ‘not measuring up to his potential’ and ‘doesn’t maintain focus’ on my report cards, but Sunni wasn’t buying it. She said if I couldn’t sit down long enough to read a book, the book would have to go along with me. She recorded chapters of my textbooks, ordered books on tape, made me wear headphones when I was messing around outside.”
Maddie’s lips parted. “You said you didn’t read.”
“It wasn’t a lie. Technically, what I did fell under the category of listening,” Aiden said. “I’ll never be as smart as you and Brendan, but I made it to graduation.”
“Not everyone can retain information that way, so you are smart.”
She was wrong. If Aiden had been smart, he would have noticed Maddie Montgomery way before now.
He tilted his head toward the heavens. “So where is Pegasus now? How did he find his way home?”
Maddie laughed. “I was eight years old, Aiden, and the constellations in the book were smaller than a postcard. This isn’t the same.”
“It’s the same sky.”
Maddie adjusted the glasses on her nose and scanned the heavens.
“He started over there.” She mapped the shape with the tip of her finger. “The crooked row of stars...those are his front legs.”
“I can see him.” Aiden leaned back. “Keep reading.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Maddie?” Janette Morrison leaned over the top of the circulation desk. “I keep hearing a beep.”
Maddie’s head jerked up, not only embarrassed the woman had caught her daydreaming but also because the “beep” Janette had heard was coming from Maddie’s purse. She’d broken one of her own rules and forgotten to silence her cell phone.
It was Aiden’s fault Maddie had been having a difficult time concentrating on her work this morning. And also on the road the night before, when she’d been driving home and the sky had come to life. Stretched beyond the pages of a dog-eared picture book.
The extra hour Maddie had spent pointing out the constellations to Aiden had kept her awake for at least three more after she’d returned to her apartment.
Maddie had told him the truth when she’d claimed that transferring the constellations from the simple illustrations in her memory to the black velvet canvas over their heads wasn’t the same.
It was so much better.
Janette moved away, and Maddie dug the phone out of her purse. A text message from Skye popped up.
Designing T-shirts for RQ. One for you?
A simple gesture, but Maddie was so touched, tears sprang to her eyes.
She sent back a quick reply.
YES!
The landline on the circulation desk rang as Maddie was putting hers away.
“Castle Falls Library.”
“May I speak with Ms. Madeline Montgomery, please?”
The feminine voice—laced with a crisp British accent—brought a smile to Maddie’s lips. “This is Maddie Montgomery.”
“Victoria Gerard. I’m calling in regard to the email you sent.”
Maddie had sent out at least half a dozen emails to library patrons before she’d left Connie in charge on Saturday morning...and the woman’s name
didn’t sound familiar.
“You had some questions concerning closed adoptions?” Victoria Gerard prompted.
Oh. Those emails.
Maddie’s knees turned to liquid, and she sank into her chair. “I... Yes. I did.”
But try as she might, Maddie couldn’t remember a single one. Victoria Gerard had caught her completely off guard. She’d expected a response from some of the adoption agencies she’d contacted, but had imagined it would be in the form of another email, not a phone call.
Victoria cleared her throat, and when she spoke again her tone had warmed up several degrees. “Perhaps you’d prefer to speak with one of our counselors? The Holt-McIntyre Agency has several qualified people on staff—”
“No,” Maddie choked out. “The questions... I’m making them on behalf of a friend.”
“I see,” Victoria said smoothly. “Well, I’ll do my best to answer them for...her.”
Maddie waved goodbye to Janette Morrison as the members of the historical society filed out the door after their meeting. Fortunately, the number of people who came into the library over the noon hour dwindled, so she would be able to talk to Victoria without interruption.
But where to start?
Maddie sent up a simple yet heartfelt prayer—help!—and a sense of peace rolled in, taking the place of her initial panic.
“If a birth mother agreed to a closed adoption, does that mean the records are permanently sealed?” Maddie asked.
“I can’t answer for other agencies, but at Holt-McIntyre, if both the child’s birth parents and the adoptive parents made a contractual agreement, of course that agreement would be considered binding.”
“My friend recently discovered that his sister was given up for adoption,” Maddie said. “I’m reaching out to adoption agencies in your area to find out what his options are.”
“There are laws governing all adoptions, but internal policies and protocol vary from agency to agency,” Victoria said slowly. “At Holt-McIntyre, we are committed to protecting our clients’ privacy. In the rare instance that one of the children placed in a closed adoption returns to us and makes inquiries about their birth family, our attorney meets with them to discuss the situation. If a health crisis leads to questions about the birth parents’ medical history, for example.”
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