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Amber let her mother pull her down to sit beside her. Her gaze jumped from Ellie to her dad, back to Sandor and then finally came back to rest on Ellie. “You look just like me.”
“Almost.”
“Your hair is darker. You don’t highlight it at all.”
“No.”
“It’s shorter, too.”
“Yes. And my eyebrows have their natural shape and I weigh at least ten pounds more than you. I don’t dress as trendily and I’m not fond of running,” she said, naming a pastime Hawk said that Amber spent a lot of time engaged in. “But I love old movies, we wear the same size shoe and I prefer silver over gold jewelry as well.”
Helen Taylor made a sound of distress.
Amber took her hand and held it. “What’s the matter, Mom?”
“Please don’t hate me, Amber. I deserve it, I know I do, but I can handle anything except that.”
“No one is going to hate you, Mrs. Taylor. We’re going to work through this,” George Wentworth said in a firm but kind tone.
Ellie was so proud of him.
“I could never hate you,” Amber vowed.
Helen shook her head, her expression turning both resigned and determined. “Before you came into the room, Mr. Wentworth asked a question. He wanted…” She stopped, seemed to collect herself and went on. “He wanted to know why I’d stolen his daughter.”
“What?”
The shock of the traumatic words reverberated through Amber to the room around her. Ellie could feel the shock wave hit her with physical force as her sister’s whole body went stiff. Then Sandor was there, wrapping both arms around Ellie, pulling her with him to a love seat, where he tugged her down right next to him. He kept her locked tight in his protective embrace while Helen blinked back tears and took several deep breaths.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“WHENIDID IT , I didn’t think I was stealing anyone. Please believe me. I-I thought you were mine.” Helen brushed the hair from Amber’s temple. “I love you so much.” She swallowed and then went on. “I’d lost my baby after the horrific accident that took Leonard’s life and caused me to go into premature labor.”
She looked at George Wentworth then, as if trying to explain what she herself found inexplicable. “Some teenagers high on pot ran a red light and plowed right into our car. I barely survived the accident. We were living near Boston at the time. They life-flighted me to the hospital from our smaller town. When my daughter died, I started haunting the baby nurseries at all the hospitals. I was there the night your wife was brought in. Everyone was running around talking about the accident. It was so much like mine. If it hadn’t been so identical, I don’t think it would have happened, but it was as if I was reliving it all over again.
“Everywhere around me, doctors and nurses were saying the exact same things they’d said the night of my accident. It’s hard to explain, but something snapped inside me. It was as if I was living out what had happened all over again, but with a different result. I created a whole new set of memories that I could deal with better than reality. Your wife went into coma, but her babies lived. I lived, but my baby died. In my mind that night, my baby lived and she was Amber.”
Ellie’s dad nodded, as if he understood such a thing. Again, she felt a spurt of pride for him.
Helen turned back to Amber. “Don’t ask me how I managed to get you out of the hospital because I don’t remember. When I got you home, all the baby stuff was still there, I thought you were my little Amber.” Her voice cracked. “I loved you so much and you were all I had left.”
Amber put her arm around her mom’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Mom.”
“It’s not okay. I lived the fantasy andbelieved it completely for five years . Except for recurring nightmares of losing my baby, everything was so good. I had this overwhelming urge to move across the country, though. I thought I wanted to get away from the painful memories of your fath…I mean my husband. Later, I realized my subconscious knew that I was running from something much worse than painful memories. We moved here when you were less than a year old.”
“But something made you remember,” Amber said gently, her tone so like George’s had been minutes before that Ellie found herself blinking back more tears.
Helen nodded. “I saw an article on George Wentworth in a business weekly.” She looked around at the rest of the people in the room. “I’m a financial analyst.”
“We know,” George said quietly.
