Читать книгу A Hickory Ridge Christmas - Dana Corbit - Страница 10

As Hannah pulled open the door, Todd released the breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. His foot ached, more likely from standing out in the cold than from where she’d squeezed it in the door, but he didn’t care. He was here, she was here, and that was all that mattered.

“Nice place,” he said before he even stepped on the mat and took a look around.

And it was nice. Though one of the four smallish apartments in a renovated older house, Hannah had made it look warm and homey with overstuffed furniture and soft pillows. It was decorated in earth tones and dotted with artistic, framed black-and-white photographs of children.

The Christmas tree he’d first glimpsed through the front window radiated warmth, as well, with its homemade ornaments, popcorn strands and spatter of silvery icicles. No hand-blown glass balls and fussy velvet bows for Hannah’s apartment.

The woman herself looked as warm and casual as her house, dressed in well-worn jeans and a black long-sleeved top. She had fuzzy slippers on her feet. But her expression showed she was anything but comfortable with him in her space, and she looked as if she’d been crying.

“Yes, we like it.”

We? The smile that had formed on his face slipped away as he turned to her. What had he missed? Hannah took a few steps into the living room and motioned for Todd to follow.

There in the corner that he couldn’t see from the front door was a tiny blond girl, surrounded by baby dolls, blankets and play bottles. For several seconds, Todd stared at the child who was looking back at him with huge, haunting eyes. She looked familiar somehow.

“Come here, honey,” Hannah called to the child. When the little girl stood under her protective arm, Hannah turned back to face him.

“Todd, this is Rebecca. She’s my daughter.”

Daughter? Hannah had a daughter? He looked back and forth between them, his thoughts spinning. Though their features were slightly different, they both had lovely peachy skin and light, light hair. They were clearly relatives.

When he glanced away to collect his thoughts, his gaze landed again on the amazing photos dotting the walls on either side of the Christmas tree. The subjects of those photos, taken in a variety of natural backdrops, weren’t children, but rather one child—the same sweet-looking little girl standing right in front of him.

Clearing his throat, he turned back to them. “Nice pictures.”

“Thanks.”

“The photographer did a great job.”

She nodded but didn’t look at the portraits. Instead, she turned to her daughter. “Rebecca, this is Mr. McBride.”

“Hi,” she said quickly before taking refuge behind her mother’s jeans-clad leg.

“Hello, Rebecca.”

Todd shook his head, trying to reconcile the new information. Parts of this puzzle weren’t fitting together easily. Was Hannah married now? Was that what Andrew had been trying to tell him when he’d suggested that healing the relationship might not be easy? If that was it, how could the minister have been so cruel as to let him go on believing…hoping?

His gaze fell to Hannah’s left hand, the one she was using to lead the child back to her toys and out of earshot of their conversation.

Hannah wore no ring.

Suddenly all of Todd’s other questions fell away as one pressed to the forefront of his mind: a question too personal for him to ask. Still, when she returned to him, he took hold of her arm and led her around the corner to the entry so he could ask it.

“Who’s her father, Hannah?”

She shot a glance back at her daughter, as if she worried Rebecca had overheard. He couldn’t blame her if she shouted, “How dare you” for the private question and more. He deserved it.

But instead of yelling, she began in a soft tone. “You have to understand—”

“Who is it?” He couldn’t help it. He didn’t want an explanation; he wanted a name. Jealousy he had no right to feel swelled inside him, burning and destroying. The thought of another man touching her left his heart raw. If only he and Hannah had waited, their story might have turned out differently. Hannah might have been his wife. Her child, theirs.

Hannah stared back at him incredulously, as if she was shocked that he’d had the gall to ask. It wasn’t about wanting; he had to know.

“Is it that blond guy from church?”

“Grant?” Her eyes widened and then she shook her head. “He’s just a friend.”

“Do I know him then?”

“Of course you do.” She spat the words.

Strange, she sounded exasperated. She seemed to think he was an idiot for not knowing the answer. He stepped around the corner and studied the child again. She was so fair and beautiful, just like her mother. Rebecca must have sensed his attention on her because she looked up from her dolls and smiled at him.

And he knew.

His gut clenched, and he felt helpless to do anything but stare. Why it wasn’t immediately apparent to him he couldn’t imagine now. Her green eyes had looked familiar because he saw eyes like those in the mirror every morning.

Though he was no expert on children’s ages and this particular child was probably small for her age, as her mother had been, he could see from her features that she wasn’t a toddler. Rebecca looked about four years old, just old enough to have been conceived five years before.

“She’s mine, isn’t she?”

Hannah didn’t answer, but her eyes filled and a few tears escaped to trail down her cheeks. She brushed them away with the backs of her hands.

“Tell me I’m right, Hannah. Am I Rebecca’s father?”

Instead of nodding the way he was certain she would, Hannah shook her head. Her jaw flexed as if she was gritting her teeth.

“How could you have thought—” She stopped whatever she’d been about to say. Closing her eyes, she pressed her hands over her closed lids and took a few deep breaths before continuing. “If you’re asking if you supplied half of her DNA, then you’re right. But for her whole life, I’ve been both parents to Rebecca. She’s mine. Just mine.”

“Not just yours. She’s mine, too.”

Todd wasn’t sure whether he’d spoken those words aloud or just in the privacy of his heart until Hannah stalked from the room and crouched down by her daughter. No, their daughter.

Maybe he hadn’t said the right thing, but what did she expect when she’d just dropped a bomb like that? He didn’t know what to think, let alone what to say.

How naive he’d been with his big plans to return here and to earn Hannah’s forgiveness and her heart. He’d thought he and Hannah were the only two involved, that their old conflicts were only between the two of them, when a third person had been growing inside Hannah before he’d ever left.

Father. He couldn’t wrap his thoughts around the title yet, let alone apply it to himself. Everything he knew about himself changed with that single admission.

“Why did you have to come back?” Hannah whispered when she returned to him, appearing more agitated than before. “We were doing fine. Just fine. Now you’ve messed all of that up. We’ll never be the same.”

“Come on, Hannah. We have a lot to talk about.”

“I don’t think so. You’ve got your answer now, so go.”

“I can’t leave now that you’ve told me this.”

“Please go.” Her eyes filled again.

Her plea tore at his heart. Clearly, they had more to say to each other, but maybe now wasn’t the best time. He was still too shocked, too confused to make any decisions that would affect their lives. Three lives.

“I won’t stay gone, you know. I’m living in Milford now, and I’m sticking around this time.”

Either she didn’t hear him or she refused to answer, but Hannah hurried him toward the door and closed it behind him. As the cold enfolded him, this time seeping to his very core rather than only touching his extremities, Todd realized that Hannah was right about one thing: None of them would ever be the same.

It wasn’t until Todd was back at his Commerce Road town house and eating chicken noodle soup that refused to warm his chilled insides that he realized he’d never apologized to Hannah. After traveling from the other side of the world in miles and in years of effort, he hadn’t even managed to do the most important thing he’d come to town to accomplish.

“You were too busy trying not to swallow your tongue to remember anything else,” he said to the stacked boxes around him.

Sitting at the new glass dinette in the kitchen, he stared down into the soup bowl and stirred the noodles into a whirlpool. His thoughts traveled in a similar circular pattern, but unlike the liquid, they wouldn’t stop spinning.

A child. His child. Of course, he should have considered the possibility that Hannah could have become pregnant. He knew the textbook mechanics of reproduction and the potential consequences of unprotected sex, but he’d never once considered that they might have made a child together. He and Hannah had only made love that one time. Apparently, it only took once.

The returned letters and unanswered calls made sense now. Not only had he left her alone with her guilt over what had happened between them, but he’d also left her alone with his child.

Alone. He felt that way now as he sat with only the bare walls and the truth to keep him company. He suddenly felt a stronger need to connect with his parents than he had at any time since he’d hugged them goodbye in Kranji a week earlier. But what would he say to them if he called? He could just imagine how that conversation would go: “Hello, Mom and Dad. Or should I say Grandma and Grandpa? I have just the best news.”

He shook his head. No, that conversation would have to wait for another day when he was prepared to hear disappointment of that magnitude over international phone lines. He wasn’t ready for that when he hadn’t digested it himself yet.

But there was one call he could make now. He pulled out the phone book, looked up the name and dialed. He didn’t even identify himself when the man answered on the second ring.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Todd said simply.

Andrew Westin sighed loudly into the line. “Todd. I had an idea I would be hearing from you.”

“You could have saved yourself the call by telling me before.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

His jaw was so tightly clenched in frustration that it took Todd a few seconds to be able to answer at all and a few seconds more to answer civilly. “It was easy. The first time I called the church, you could have said, ‘Hey, Todd, it’s good to hear from you. Just thought you should know, you’re a dad.’”

“Sure, I could have done that.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“It wasn’t my place. Then or now.”

Todd stalked over to the tan striped couch, dropped onto it and sank into the backrest. “Then or now? What do you mean by that?”

“Hannah never told anyone who the father of her baby was. Until now.”

“Until now?” Todd straightened in his seat. There could be no slouching after a comment like that, one that crushed as much as it confused. Hannah had been more ashamed of him than she’d been of being an unwed mother. He didn’t know what to do with that information.

“Wait. Then how did you know?”

“I told you Serena and I had guessed you two were more than friends when we saw you together.”

Todd swallowed. “Oh.”

“So, when Hannah became pregnant, we suspected. Then when little Rebecca arrived, we…well knew.”

The image of those pretty green eyes filled his mind again. If Andrew and Serena had already been suspecting, he could easily see how they’d connected the dots to solve the puzzle. They’d probably put it together faster than he had.

“What about Reverend Bob?”

“If he knows, he’s never mentioned it to me.” Andrew paused. “Bob was always more concerned with supporting his daughter than tracking down his grandchild’s father.”

“Another reason I never found out the truth.”

“Todd, I always thought she would open up eventually, that she would tell you. But she didn’t. So when you called looking for answers, I figured God was suggesting that I help the truth along.”

“I don’t know whether to say thanks or not.” Todd shoved his free hand through his hair.

“But you know now, right?”

Todd blew out a breath. “Yes, I know.”

“And how do you feel about that?”

“Don’t use all that psychobabble on me, okay Reverend?”

“Fine. But she’s a cute one, your daughter.”

Emotion filled Todd’s throat with a speed that surprised him. Rebecca was his daughter, and she didn’t even know him.

“Yeah…she’s beautiful,” he choked out finally.

Andrew chuckled into the line. “Spoken like a true father. I do have one more question for you.”

“What’s that?”

“What are you going to do about it now that you know?”

What are you going to do? Todd didn’t have an answer for the minister’s question or for his own as they said their goodbyes. He clicked off the phone and laid it on the end table. It was a given that he would take some responsibility for the care of his child. His parents would expect that, and he expected that of himself. He didn’t even want to remember all the other things he’d expected to happen when he returned to Milford.

Disquiet had him pushing off the sofa and crossing to the light wood bookshelf he’d just purchased and already had crammed with books. His fingers closed over a heavy cloth-covered album his mother had insisted he take with him on the plane at Changi International Airport. He took it back to the table and plunked it next to the bowl of soup that had already congealed.

He sat and opened it to the first page. It was as he predicted: a tribute to the lives and loves of the McBride clan. He would expect nothing less from Sharon McBride than a maudlin display, sure to cause more homesickness than to cure it.

The first few pages were all family pictures, both of the posed professional variety and informal shots taken in front of their homes in Milford and then in Kranji. His mother had a talent for pulling heartstrings.

Todd flipped through images of himself eating his first birthday cake, standing proudly on the first day of kindergarten and marching in the high school band. Then came photos of his friends in Singapore and even a few of Todd and Hannah hanging out at the Milford Memories festival. Because those last shots tempted him to feel sorry for himself, he turned the page.

The next pictures made him smile: first the wedding portrait of Roy McBride and the former Sharon Quinn and then a few other black-and-white snapshots of the two of them as children.

When Todd reached the last yellowing image at the bottom right, he stopped. He stared at the little girl looking out at him from the paper. In the white trim at the photo’s bottom edge, someone had written in a slanted script, “Sharon, age four,” but the picture could just as easily have been of Hannah’s child. Not subtle like the similarity his daughter had to him, the resemblance between his mother and Rebecca was so obvious that at the same age they could have been twins.

Why that was the trigger—this mirror image— Todd couldn’t explain, and yet he was suddenly furious. His hands clasped the edge of the table so hard he could feel the glass side imprinting on his palm. His jaw flexed, and he could feel his pulse beating at his temple.

How could Hannah not have told him? No matter what he’d done, no matter how angry she was with him or how much she wanted to cast him as the villain who deserved all the blame, he still had the right to know he’d fathered a child. The chance to be a father to his child.

He’d deserved the truth.

Would he have been a great father at seventeen? It was hard to say, but he’d deserved the chance to try. So much time had already passed. Rebecca was four years old. Whether she’d done it consciously or not, Hannah had stolen that time from them, time they could never get back.

The whole situation just didn’t make sense. The Hannah he’d known could never have been so cruel as to keep this monumental secret from him. Then a thought struck him at his foundation. Maybe he hadn’t known her at all. Maybe the girl he’d fallen in love with had only existed in his mind, and the future he’d planned for them was just as much of an illusion.

None of what he thought before could matter. Everything was different now that he knew about Rebecca. He still wanted to apologize to Hannah for past events, but the present was much more important. They needed to discuss Rebecca’s care and to work out a plan for him to get to know his daughter.

Hannah would fight him on that, he was sure, but she didn’t know him, either, if she thought that battle would be an easy one. Maybe he hadn’t fought hard enough when Hannah had decided to eliminate him from her life five years ago, but he’d done a lot of growing up since then—physically and spiritually. Hannah had just better get it through her mind that he was here and he wasn’t going away.