Page 29 of Holding Ground

Guilt pulls me under like quicksand. My dad and Molly are everything to me, and I don’t want them to think I’m ungrateful for the unconditional love they’ve given me my entire life. My chest grows tight, and I can’t breathe. I backspace until her name is no longer on the screen and shut my laptop.

I’ve gone my entire life without knowing anything about her. I was raised by two parents who loved me and would do anything for me, with a huge extended family who never made me feel as if I was only half theirs.

What kind of daughter does it make me for wanting to know more about her?

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

Emelia

Sunday morning, I sit on the bed with my laptop open, my mom’s name blinking in the search bar again.

Every time I try to push through the idea of finding out more about my biological mother, it pushes back twice as hard. Yes, I’d love to know if my maternal line has any of the conditions Dr. Fenmore mentioned, but it’s deeper than that.

Maybe I should just give in. If I do, maybe it won’t loom so large in my mind.

All I know about my birth mom is where she’s from and her name. My dad told me that when I was three, a lawyer showed up to tell him he was a father and that my mother had left her family behind after high school. I’m assuming her keeping her family out of her life means it wasn’t a good situation. Do I really want to wade into those waters?

But I’ve always wondered, and what can really happen with a name search? I probably won’t even find anything.

My finger hits the Enter button on the search before I talk myself out of it again.

Nothing comes up, which isn’t surprising. My mother died twenty-nine years ago, so why would there be any trace of her online?

I try another avenue and go to Facebook to see if I can find any community groups from her hometown. Maybe that’s a better place to start. I request to join a few, but I’ll have to wait until I’m approved before I can search in them for any mention of her name.

I close my laptop and sigh, picturing my mom and dad’s faces if they knew what I just did. That same familiar guilt rests in my stomach that I’m going behind their backs.

“I need to do something.” I toss my laptop aside and get up off the bed.

Sitting around here all day isn’t going to get me out of my head, so I change into a pair of leggings, a white crop top, and throw on a light-blue denim button-up. It’s a nice September day, but it’s definitely no longer summer up here. A nice walk around the lake with fresh air will help clear my head about all this. It always worked back home.

As I step out onto the small porch, Elliott’s truck pulls into the driveway beside the house.

Great.

He climbs out of the truck, and I head in that direction to reach the road. The moment Baylor’s feet touch the ground, she runs in my direction.

“Baylor,” Elliott says with a note of warning. He still doesn’t want his daughter near me. I guess that conversation on the dock was useless.

She stops and puts her finger up, continuing to run toward me.

But she doesn’t seem to see me. Then I get a better look at her. She looks upset, as though she’s running away from him. But when she notices me, I freeze in place.

She hurries over to me. Her cheeks are pink when she stops in front of me. It’s her frown, her tears welling in her eyes.

“Is everything okay?” I look across the yard to the side of the house where Elliott stands, frowning, arms crossed.

“My friends were in town.”

“Well, that must have been nice.”

She shakes her head, her bottom lip trembling. I can tell that she’s trying hard not to cry, and I want to scoop her up in my arms and help her feel better, but it’s not my place.

Instead, I crouch down so I’m at eye level with her. “What happened?”

Her gaze meets mine. Her eyes are a shade bluer with unshed tears in them. “They were all at the park together, playing.”