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“I haven't hired a new cleaning person since the last one quit. Sarah Jane would have taken care of it, and now…” He let his words die off and shoved his hands in his pockets.
Tempted as she was to tell him to go to hell, she'd known when Hank dropped her off this morning that her former mentor wouldn't let her leave today without the talk.
“Come on in, Ed.”
Like a stray dog thankful for any scrap of affection, his face lit up and he hurried to an empty chair. “So, I can't change your mind?”
“I needed a change.” Switching over to family advocacy law had been huge challenge, but she loved her new life. She'd never been happier.
“Yeah, I've gotten that from a lot of folks ever since…well, ever since it came out.”
That was small-town justice for you. Word had spread like wildfire and censure swept in behind, turning his bumper crop of a life into a fallow field. “I heard about the divorce. Sorry.”
He shrugged, his once beefy frame shrunken to skeletal proportions. “To be expected, I guess. She'd always suspected there were others, but public confirmation was too much. This practice is all I have left and the bank is breathing down my neck, wanting the balloon payment for the loan I took to finance the land purchases, so I probably won't have it for much longer.”
Beth could only imagine what it had been like for him. She'd lived under a microscope. Conversations had slammed to a stop whenever she'd rolled her cart into a new aisle at the grocery store, picked out Christmas presents at the mall or walked into the New Year’s Eve party at the country club. Dry Creek's gossips had rolled the situation around and examined it from every angle. No one had escaped scrutiny—including Ed's and Sarah Jane's son, Phil.
“You know it's not true. Not that I can stop the talk. Not that anyone would believe me.”
He had to be kidding. “Don't bother. Sarah Jane told me everything. You may not deserve all the hell you're getting, but you're not the injured party here.”
“I was a different man then, drank too much and hurt people without a second thought. I was an asshole, probably still am, but nothing like that. When Sarah Jane lost the baby—”
“Lost the baby?” She reined in the urge to slap him. “You make it sound like Phil wandered off from the hospital. The newspaper got ahold of the police reports. They found her diaries, almost thirty years’ worth of written misery. She gave the baby up for adoption in a pathetic attempt to hold on to you.”
“I haven't read the paper in months. Shit, is that really what she wrote? I knew she’d been confused, but I hadn't realized she'd totally lost touch with reality.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Phil isn't our son.”
Before her eyes, Ed deflated. His face changed from haggard to haunted. His hands shook as he stared off into the distance.
“Right before I broke up with her, we went to Denver for the weekend for a client meeting. She was six months pregnant, but no one knew. She'd worked so hard at hiding it under bulky clothes. I was panicking, worried my wife would find out. I'd tried to convince her to give the baby up, but she wouldn't.”
His voice trembled and he blinked several times before continuing.
“The cramps started at the hotel. She'd taken a bath, hoping they'd go away. I'd gone down to the hotel bar to mellow out with a couple of bourbons. When I got back to the room two hours later, she was still in the tub. The blood…it was everywhere. They saved her, but the baby didn't make it.?
??
He didn't bother to wipe away the tears spilling onto his cheeks. “The whole time, I'd been wishing that baby would disappear. You'd think I would have been thrilled. A nurse came and took me to say goodbye in the morgue. They'd cleaned him up, wiped away the blood and wrapped him in a blue-and-white striped blanket. Hell, he was so tiny, shorter than my forearm, with these little fingers that should have curled around mine.”
Beth sank down in her chair and Ed wept in front of her, silently.
“I knew she didn't believe me or the hospital folks when she woke up without a baby. Nothing we said could convince her. They'd already cremated the baby. It was like he'd never existed.” Ed's voice broke and he gulped in air like a condemned man. “And damn my soul to hell, that's how I acted. Like it had never happened. Any time she brought it up I ignored her, until finally she made herself believe she'd given up the baby. I figured if it made my life easier for her to say that, then fine, I'd play along. But I never realized she really believed it.”
Nausea rolled over Beth in waves as she gripped the arms of her desk chair, willing her stomach to relax. She wanted to scream “liar” at him, make him take it all back.
But his story answered one of the largest doubts about Sarah Jane. Finding her long-lost son in the office where she worked seemed a little too convenient. And how had she known it was Phil? Nearly thirty years ago, adoption cases were considered closed. Even if both the child and the birth parent wanted to find each other, the hurdles were extraordinary.
The chance of Sarah Jane finding her son was astronomical. Her diaries had never detailed how she'd discovered what she believed to be the truth. Instead, she’d written about the curl of Phil's smile and the way he talked with his hands, so much like his father that she just knew it was him.
“How could you have done this? People died because of you two and your twisted, fucked-up secrets.”
He sank farther into his seat, as if he could disappear into its leather cushions. “I never meant—”
“No, I'm sure you never did. You never meant to be an asshole. It was because you drank too much. You never meant to cheat on your wife. It was because the others were so willing. You never meant to wreck a woman's psyche so thoroughly that she lost touch with reality and devoted her life to ruining yours. You don't mean to do a lot of things, Ed, but everything sure seems to go to shit around you.” She rocketed out of her seat, snatched the box from the desk and stormed to the door.
