“I’m sorry you’ve had to go through all that, Lily,” Finn said quietly when she had finished. “It’s enough to send anyone to a place like this.”
“Well, enough about me,” Lily said, attempting a smile. “What’s been going on with you?”
“So you know how I started out at NASA? I was there nearly a decade, got the experience of a lifetime there. Then at about year ten, a few colleagues and I decided to start our own company, SkyTech, using all we’d learned from the best in the world. I loved being independent, working for myself. It also gave me the opportunity to spend more time with my wife.” Finn looked down at the floor, clasping his hands on his knee. “You see, she only had about a year left to live.”
“Tell me about her,” Lily said softly.
“Her name was Eve. She was beautiful, like the light. I’ll never forget the day we met. A colleague had invited me to a family barbecue, and she was a friend of a friend who’d gotten dragged along. She wore a white dress that had these little green leaves sprinkled all over it, like she’d just laid down in some freshly mowed field and gotten up. When I told her that, she reacted like I’d said something clever rather than used a weird pickup line. That’s when I knew she was someone I wanted to get to know. I knew I wanted to marry her, for her to be the mother of my children. We were married only two months later.”
“Did you have children?”
Finn just shook his head. He and Eve had planned on starting a family, but a year after they’d gotten married, Eve started to feel extreme fatigue; her hair started to fall out, and she lost more weight than she could afford from her already slender frame. Since she was a nurse, she just thought she was stressed. But it turned out she had a rare blood disease that in most cases was fatal within a year of diagnosis.
“We did everything we could to cram a lifetime of marriage into that last year. We’d dreamed of traveling the world, but now that she wasn’t well enough to leave the house, I tried to bring the world to her. Silly things like getting takeout from a different cuisine every night, or I’d dress up in some ridiculous costume, but it would make her smile. Her smile is what I miss the most.”
“What did she look like?”
In response, Finn merely took out his phone. The lock screen was the picture of a dark-haired woman whose face was half-turned, as if she had been caught unawares. But the smile on her face, directed to whoever had caught her, was unmistakable, and Lily thought she was indeed beautiful, like the light, just as Finn had said. Under different circumstances, she would felt a little jealous of whoever Finn married, but now she only felt grateful that this woman had given Finn such happiness, if for only a short time.
“How do you move on from losing someone like that?” she wondered aloud. She focused on Finn’s sorrowful face. “How did you move on?”
“I don’t know if I really have. But I just signed a contract to oversee a Sky Tech project in India. I’ll be living there for the next two years.”
“That’s so far away,” she murmured.
“Yes, but it’ll be a welcome diversion. I need to shake things up in my regular life. Waking up every morning in the same bed that Eve and I shared, walking through the rooms that she walked through . . . I won’t pretend it isn’t hard. Every moment I’ll think I hear her footsteps in the hallway, or her turning on the faucet in the kitchen. It’s like living with her ghost.”
Lily nodded, remembering her parents. “I know what that’s like.”
“So I’m putting all the furniture in storage, renting out the place to a nice young couple with a kid, hoping that by the time I get back, the place will feel different. And if not, and if I decide to sell and move somewhere else, start my life over . . . well, thirty-seven isn’t that old.”
“I wish I could try that,” Lily admitted. “I wish I could go thousands of miles away to another country, but I can barely drag myself out of bed in the morning.”
“I don’t think another country would be the right place for you,” Finn said. “You said you don’t want to be in New York right now? You should go back to Red Rose Farm. Home may be just where you need to be.”
Home. She would have no family left at Red Rose Farm, but it was still where she had felt the most loved, where her most precious memories were kept.
“There’s one other thing,” Lily began, then paused. Every day since she’d arrived at Golden Woods, she’d taken out that worn slip of paper with her birth mother’s name on it. “I’ve never told anyone about this, not even Peyton, but the day before I left for New York, Aunt Martha gave me the name of my birth mother. My real mother, Carrie Ellen, had written it down for her to pass on to me when she thought the time was right.” Lily took a deep breath. “Maybe the time is right for me to start looking for her.”
“I think you should,” Finn replied. “You’ll always wonder if you don’t, and who knows, maybe she’ll end up being someone you can get to know. It’s worth trying. Because if it’s one thing I’ve learned from these past few years, it’s holding tight to the people you love that matters most. Who you could love.”
Visiting hours were almost over. This time, when Lily hugged Finn goodbye, she could feel the weight of what he’d just told her, about losing his wife and trying to overcome the grief that came with it. But at the same time, she had every conviction that he’d emerge stronger from it. Maybe she and Finn would see each other again when he came back from India, maybe not, but she’d never forget how he’d had the compassion to visit her at her lowest moment.
After Finn had gone, Lily spent the evening in her room thinking about what he’d suggested. Maybe she should go back to the place that had always been a haven for her, where she felt like she could be her true self—Red Rose Farm. She could just picture the bluegrass and the trees turning color, not in the same way it did up in the northeast but equally magnificent. The horses would be growing their winter coats, and the dogs would be lying in front of the living room fireplace as the weather started to get chilly. That was where she could find her heart again. And then maybe, when she felt up to it, she could pursue the whereabouts of Anna James Jefferson, the only family she had left in this world. What would she look like? Lily imagined an older version of herself but wiser, kinder, someone who could tell Lily what she should do next.
With that image fixed in her mind, she got up and started to pack.
Chapter 19
THERE WAS NOTHING MORE COMFORTING to Lily than waking up at Red Rose Farm in her large, old, four-poster bed surrounded by her dogs. She loved her jewel box of a room, the walls a soft lavender, with Palladian windows stretching from the floor to the ceiling, its cathedral ceiling covered in white bead board. Every window brought nature inside, the morning sun shining through the trees and bringing the promise of a new day.
On the bureau opposite the bed was a signature Red Rose Farm silver chalice filled with luscious pink tea roses. Beside it sat framed pictures of her mother and father, her aunt and uncle, and her beloved dog Rebel, reminding her of how much she missed them. Sometimes she imagined her parents and Aunt Martha and Uncle Grant were just downstairs having coffee. Yet, except for all her sweet animals—including Sable and Hollywood, whom she’d brought with her from New York—Lily nevertheless felt terribly alone. However, after what she just learned from a private investigator in Lexington, she did have one last hope.
Lily had spent the past month recuperating at Red Rose Farm. She sat for hours by the fireplace with her dogs lying at her feet, staring out at the rolling fields beyond the windows. On several nights she had to be transported to the medical center in Lexington with her chest pounding and her feeling faint. For a while panic had been her constant companion. Aside from her farm manager Marcus and his elderly father Ray, she came in little contact with anyone else. Back in New York, the divorce papers had gone through, and Lily had not contested a single line. Perhaps out of pity, Richard Reynolds had given her one of the family’s lovely properties in Palm Beach. Lily had fond m
emories of her wedding in Palm Beach and many joyful and contented vacations there. Someday she would go there, but for the moment she had no desire to be anywhere else.
Just like so many years ago after her parents’ death, being at Red Rose Farm reawakened Lily’s heart. For the first time in months she felt the stirrings of wanting to return to work, to her real life in New York. But she couldn’t go back until she knew who she really was. After thirteen years since her Aunt Martha had placed that worn slip of paper in her hands, she decided it was time for her to find her birth mother. But how to go about actually doing it? Since she’d had luck with finding Finn through the Internet, that was the first place she turned to. But when a cursory search revealed no one by the name of Anna James Jefferson, and she didn’t have the energy to pursue it any further, she hired a private investigator to start looking in Lexington, the closest large city to where her parents had told her she’d been adopted. Within two weeks the investigator had handed her a file, which was now sitting downstairs on her kitchen table.
“Let’s go, boys,” Lily told the dogs that were wiggling and playing on her bed, and it was like racing thunder as they fought for first place barreling down the stairs.
In the kitchen, Lily made herself coffee and started to scan the numbers of how the Lily Rose boutiques across the nation were doing. The CFO had sent his report earlier in the week and needed her final approval to continue. Although she hadn’t been in New York for months, Lily had followed every business move through her trusted associates. With that taken care of, she pushed the report out of the way and opened the private investigator’s file in front of her. Of course she’d read it many times since it had been delivered to her, but the facts still filled her with wonder.
Anna James Jefferson had grown up in Paris, Kentucky, a small town outside of Lexington. Her parents had gotten divorced when she was a child, and her mother had later remarried. At eighteen she gave birth to a baby girl and put that baby up for adoption; a father was never named on the birth certificate. Then she started school at Emory University in Atlanta, where she studied psychology. After graduation, she married a businessman named William Baker, and had been known as Anna Baker for the past thirty years. This was likely the reason Lily hadn’t been able to find any information about her on the Internet. But there was plenty of local news coverage of Anna Baker the socialite, write-ups of charity galas she had attended—many that she herself had hosted—even a magazine cover where she posed in a ball gown and was dubbed “Baker’s Beauty.”
Lily scrutinized that image the most. At the time the shot was taken, her birth mother was probably close to the age Lily was now, and she was indeed a beauty. Her long golden hair flowed over her shoulders, her eyes sparkled a bright blue—although a different shade of blue than her own eyes, Lily noted—and her figure was stunning. But it wasn’t as if Lily could take one look at her and could immediately see the resemblance. A needle of disappointment pricked her heart, but she moved on. She hoped to find out more from other pictures, but in the most recent photo that had been provided, from a few years ago at the Kentucky Derby, a large hat was covering Anna Baker’s face so it wasn’t clear what she looked like.
The final piece of information in the file was the most important: a phone number. But as much as Lily was tempted to call it and tell the woman on the other end that she was her long-lost daughter, she knew that only worked in fairy tales. If she were Anna, she would never believe a stranger calling her out of the blue, claiming to be who she was. No, Lily needed to find a way to see her birth mother in the flesh, to find out what kind of person she was, before she made her earth-shattering revelation. From the photos and articles she had seen about Anna, she seemed to be someone who liked being in the limelight, but probably hadn’t been for a while. With that thought, Lily came up with the perfect hook. Confidently, she called the number in the file.
“Hello?” a surprisingly husky voice said on the other end. For a moment Lily’s heart skipped a beat—this was the voice of her birth mother—before she regained her composure. “Who is this?” the voice sounded again, impatiently.
“Mrs. Baker? I’m an editor with Luxury magazine in New York.”
“Yes?” The sudden interest so evident in the voice was like a dog pricking up its ears.
“Your name was given to us as someone who might be interested in having their home featured in our winter issue devoted to grand houses in Atlanta.”
“Yes. Yes, I would.”
From then on, it was easy for Lily to say she was making arrangements for a reporter to come down to Atlanta and conduct an interview the following week. After she set down her phone, she sat still for a moment, her insides swirling with anticipation and anxiety. What was going to happen? Would she tell her birth mother the truth and instantly be welcomed into the fold? Maybe Anna would love her, want her. Lily could imagine it all now, describing the loss of her parents and her aunt and uncle. Anna would say, “Don’t worry, Lily Rose, I have always loved and missed you, and it’s going to be wonderful when you meet the rest of my family.” Although Lily knew that was a daydream, she couldn’t help believing a bit of it. Perhaps Anna wouldn’t embrace her immediately, but what mother wouldn’t want to get to know her own daughter?
* * *
On the day she was set to meet her birth mother, Lily spent considerable time in the morning pondering her wardrobe and deciding what to wear. She finally settled on her usual fashion armor, which she hadn’t worn since she’d been in New York, consisting of a black silk turtleneck, slim-fitting black trousers, and black stiletto heels. The only jewelry she wore was a Cartier watch and her mother’s gold wedding ring on her right hand. Her hair she chose to leave down, where it framed her face in pale blond waves. Nervously, she pushed her hair back that afternoon as she stepped out of her car and walked up the long driveway to the house in Buckhead. The Antebellum mansion was every inch a typical home of that area, with a large white edifice and pillars marching around it. Feeling, as the old Southern saying went, like a cat on a hot tin roof, Lily pressed the doorbell.
A housekeeper answered the door and ushered her into the living room. The walls were lemonade yellow, and cathedral floor-to-ceiling windows opened onto a lush green garden. Comfortable sofas and chairs covered in a floral chintz pattern were arranged beneath a sparkling crystal chandelier. On the coffee table sat an enormous vase overflowing with green hydrangeas. It would be perfect, Lily thought, for a magazine spread, if that were the real reason she was there.
“Good afternoon,” came the same husky voice that she had heard on the phone. Anna Baker walked into the room and sat down in a chair opposite Lily on the sofa.
At once, Lily could see traces of the woman from the magazine cover. She was still beautiful in her early fifties, with her thick golden hair streaming over her shoulders, a shade too vibrant to be faked. She wore red lipstick and a formfitting Versace dress that was the same color. Lily was not a Versace fan, as she found it flashy and loud, but maybe the apple fell a little farther from the tree when it came to style. The dress did show off Anna’s trim figure and her smooth, tanned legs. Her face looked remarkably unlined, although from her work at the department store that brought her into constant contact with women of a certain age and type, Lily knew that this was probably the result of a very good plastic surgeon. Like those women, Anna Baker was most likely trying to hold on to her youth, and from the looks of it, she wasn’t doing that bad of a job.
Beyond that shiny surface, Lily searched for any familial resemblance. But as it had been when she’d first seen the magazine cover, she saw less than she had hoped for. Her birth mother was taller, her figure fuller, her voice deeper, although Lily didn’t know it was from decades of chain-smoking. None of her mannerisms so far struck a chord, but perhaps more would be revealed after they started talking.
“Thank you for taking the time to speak with me, Mrs. Baker,” Lily began.
“Oh, you can call me Jeff.”
Jeff leaned in closer, as if intrigued by the chic young woman before her. “Are you originally from New York?”
“No, I’m from…” Lily hesitated, unsure of revealing the truth about her origins. “I’m from Kentucky.”
She looked boldly at Jeff to gauge her reaction, but Jeff just said, “That must have been interesting.”
Encouraged to speak further, Lily replied, “It was. Have you ever been there?”
“No, never.” Jeff abruptly changed the subject. “Where are you staying in Atlanta?”
“The Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead.”
“Oh, I adore that place. That’s where I met my husband, Billy, when I was in college. Our eyes just met across the bar and I knew he was the one for me.” Jeff smiled fondly at the memory. “I had never been involved with anyone before that, not even in high school. Billy is my first and only love.”
But what about the man who was her biological father? Lily wondered. The birth certificate had not given the father’s name, but that certainly didn’t mean his identity was unknown to Jeff. Lily had surmised, given Jeff’s age when she’d given birth to her, that her biological parents must have been teenagers caught in a bad situation. But Lily had hoped they’d had some kind of relationship, that at least she had been conceived out of some kind of love, primordial as it might have been.
Before she could think any more about that, Jeff asked, “Are you married?”
“I recently got divorced,” Lily admitted.
“I’m sorry to hear that. But I’m sure you can easily find another man.” Jeff spoke benevolently to her from the position of an older woman giving advice to a younger one. “Why, a beautiful girl like you? They’ll be beating down your door. Of course, if you don’t have any children. There are no children involved, are there?”
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