Page 338 of Romeo

“Granny adopted me,” I said. “My parents didn’t adopt me.”

“They did, Fi.”

“My mother was my mother.” I turned on him, suddenly furious with the entire conversation even though I knew Jasper hadn’t created any of it. “My dad was my dad. They didn’t become less mine because somebody found some file eighteen years later.”

“They didn’t.” Jasper’s answer came immediately. “I’m not tellin’ you they weren’t your parents. They raised you. They loved you. They were your mom and dad.”

A memory surfaced before I could stop it. My mother sitting beside my bed while I was sick, her fingers moving slowly through my hair as she sang. I couldn’t remember the song anymore, and that loss bothered me sometimes more than the big memories I knew were gone. I could still remember how her palm felt against my forehead, though, cool and gentle, and how completely safe I had been because she was there.

That woman was my mother.

Nothing Jasper said could change that.

“She sang to me when I was sick,” I whispered.

Jasper’s expression softened. “Then that’s your mom singin’ to you. Adoption doesn’t take that away.”

Charlie entered my thoughts so quickly it felt like Jasper had put him there. I had given birth to Charlie, but Claudia was his mother. Frank was his father. I had never thought of Claudia as less real because she hadn’t carried him. She was the one who was building his childhood around him, and I had chosen her because I believed she could do exactly that. My mother had done the same for me. The realization didn’t make learning I was adopted less shocking, but it stopped the fear that something had just stolen her from me.

I returned to the table and sat slowly. Jasper didn’t offer his hand this time. I reached for it myself. “How did they get me?”

“That’s what Carly was able to trace.” Jasper laced his fingers through mine and waited until I met his eyes. “A man called Knuckles contacted the Society when you were born. He wanted the baby in his care placed somewhere she would disappear from the life she’d been born into. The Society contact who took that request was a man named Isaac. Isaac had a brother and sister-in-law who couldn’t have children. Instead of puttin’ you through whatever process the Society normally used, he arranged for his brother and his wife to take you.”

The words moved slowly through me until one finally caught. “His brother and his wife were my parents?”

“Yeah.”

I looked away because tears came without warning. It wasn’t the adoption that did it. It was knowing they couldn’t have children. Knowing that before I ever became Fiona, there had been two people who wanted a baby and believed they might never have one. Then someone placed me in their lives.

“They wanted me,” I said, and my voice broke on the last word.

Jasper squeezed my hand. “Yeah, baby. They wanted you.”

Questions flooded in so quickly I couldn’t separate them.

Had my mother held me first?

Had Dad?

Which one of them chose Fiona?

Had they known I already had a name?

Had they planned to tell me someday?

I had spent years wishing for one more conversation with my parents. Suddenly I had a dozen new questions to add to all the others they would never answer. Jasper couldn’t give me those pieces, and I didn’t ask him to invent them. He told me what Carly knew instead. Isaac arranged the placement and the legal identity. I became Fiona Mitchell and was raised by my parents until they died in the car accident. After that, I entered foster care, and the trail that had connected me to my birth disappeared.

“So foster care lost me,” I murmured, wiping beneath my eyes with my free hand.

“Pretty fuckin’ effectively.”

A strange laugh escaped me. “I spent years thinking the system couldn’t keep track of anything.”

“Apparently that was finally useful.”

That little piece of normal Jasper gave me enough space to breathe again. He continued more carefully, explaining that Carly had traced me through the foster system until she reached Rosewood. By the time she reached Martha Steiner, Carly knew Fiona Mitchell-Steiner and Kaitlyn Grace Ward were the same person.

I hated the thought of a stranger reading my life in records. On paper, those years probably looked neat. Foster placement. Pregnancy. Homelessness. Birth. Adoption. None of it showed me watching Claudia find Charlie, holding my breath until I knew he was safe. It didn’t show Frank becoming his father or Granny looking at me like she had already decided I belonged to her before I understood what she was offering. Facts could tell Carly where I had been. They couldn’t tell her who I was.