The Daughter He Wanted. Kristina Knight

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ side of the road. Took a couple of deep breaths and tried to make sense of the jittery feeling in his stomach. He’d been fine talking to Paige about the clinic, been fine seeing his daughter’s face for the first time covered in cake icing. Sure, when she brought up Dee his hands got sweaty, but that was normal. No one liked talking about dead spouses, did they?

      Everything was fine until Paige said Kaylie’s name.

      Then he couldn’t get out of the little white house with the pink door and wicker porch furniture fast enough. He hit his head lightly against the steering wheel. It was just a name. An innocuous name.

      A name that changed everything one more time.

      The call from the lawyer had him taking a day off work just to make sure the little girl’s life was ordered. He never took off work. Not since the funeral. Work was real and the reality was that his world imploded when Dee got sick. He’d made sense of what was left and built a decent life again. Sure, he avoided places like the Low Bar and no, he didn’t really like the summer and winter rec leagues, but it kept his friends off his back and distracted him from the big, empty house in Park Hills.

      Maybe he should have moved. He got as far as donating most of Dee’s things, but moving out of the house she loved had felt...wrong on some level. So he stayed.

      Kaylie Ann Kenner. Paige’s voice echoed in his ear. The plan had been to knock on the door, make sure everything was in place and go back to work. Put the little girl in a box in his mind, but leave her and the mother alone. He had needed to know and now he knew.

      And the plan was out the window. He couldn’t see her picture and know her name and not know her, too. Alex swallowed.

      Kaylie was real. Paige was totally and completely real from her paint-dribbled feet to the freckles over her nose. Why did he have to take her hand? That little jolt of electricity he’d felt in the truck was nothing compared to the full-on sizzle that’d raced through his fingertips at her kitchen counter.

      For the first time in three years he wanted real. Tangible. Not the memories that floated around the big house. Not the too-loud laughter that sometimes escaped him when everyone watched to make sure he got the joke, that he was really there with them, in the moment. Paige hadn’t looked at him like that, not once. And not once had he mentally escaped the pretty white kitchen with the hardwood floors and black granite countertops. He couldn’t remember a single time in the past few years when he’d been as present as he’d been from the moment he parked the truck at Paige’s curb.

      A low-slung convertible swerved around his truck, honking, and Alex shook himself. He pulled back onto the highway and started for Park Hills, and as usual took a right at the light rather than the left that would take him home. The wrought-iron gates were still open, the tree-lined lane shaded from the afternoon sun. Alex pulled through the gates and drove past the statue of the floating angel, turned at the mausoleum that always looked haunted. Stopped the truck before a gray headstone with Dee’s name and dates.

      And didn’t open the door. He sat there for a long time with his hand on the door handle, unable to move. What was he going to say to her? Hey, honey, you know how I didn’t want to do IVF? Well, thanks to your insistence now I have a daughter. He could imagine the back-of-the-head slap Dee would give him with that one.

      Don’t be so flip, she’d say and demand all the details. Not that he had that many. He had a meeting scheduled tomorrow with the head of the clinic, but for now he only knew what the lawyer had told him on the phone: his sample was mislabeled and used as donor sperm instead of being destroyed. She’d turned four in the spring, according to the picture on Paige’s windowsill, so Kaylie would have been conceived sometime in the three-month window between when they learned about the cancer and when they learned it was terminal. Before he sent in the paperwork to have his samples destroyed. And he definitely couldn’t tell Dee that for the first time in three years he felt alive and it was because of another woman.

      No, he couldn’t tell her that, not any of it. Because he had a daughter, thanks to her, and he had a life, such as it was. All she had was nothing. No babies to hold. No more laughter when he burned the steaks on the grill. No more life to grab on to.

      Alex restarted the truck and pulled past her marker, down the shaded lane and back onto the main road. He grabbed dinner at a drive-through window and continued to his big, empty house. The forest-green shutters needed to be repainted, he realized when he pulled into the drive, and this weekend he should probably do a final mowing of the grass. In the kitchen he opened the cupboard door but instead of picking up one of Dee’s fancy plates he dumped his food on a paper plate and grabbed a beer from the fridge.

      The canned laugh track from the sitcom annoyed him so he flipped over to a sports channel rerunning a Cardinals game from several years back. He ate his dinner sitting on the sofa Dee had bought, surrounded by the plants she liked and with her picture still on the mantel.

      He wished like hell she was sitting on the sofa with him—and kicked the coffee table when he realized the woman he was imagining was Paige.

      * * *

      “WHAT I REALLY want to know is how this happened at all.” It was just before noon on Thursday, the day after meeting Alex, and Paige was expected back at school in just over an hour. She should have taken the entire day off work rather than just this morning.

      While they were in the waiting area, Alex asked why she kept checking her watch. One thing led to another and they waived their confidentiality rights to face the lab supervisor together. They both wanted the same answers: how and why did this happen?

      Alex sat in the chair next to her, arms folded over his chest. The supervisor looked uncomfortable. The longer this meeting went on, the nicer it felt to have someone on her side. Not that he was on her side, not really.

      Paige glanced at the watch on her wrist. The drive from the fertility clinic to Bonne Terre would take at least forty-five minutes. She did the math. If the paper-pusher across the heavy oak desk didn’t give them some answers in about ten minutes she would have to leave and come back.

      Not going to happen. And she wasn’t going to be pushed into another phone conversation with the lawyer, either. During the first phone call, she’d been too numb to ask questions about what happened four years ago. The donor she’d picked was a college graduate, Caucasian, of average height and weight. All of which fit Alex, except Alex wasn’t a donor. He’d been an IVF candidate along with his wife.

      Now he was in Paige’s life and she needed to know why. Why, when she had been so careful in her choices, when she had made so many changes in her life, did this have to happen now?

      The lab supervisor seemed honestly upset on their behalf, but he was still a company employee.

      “My wife and I were assured that samples were checked and double-checked. That there was no need to worry about—”

      “Human error,” the man across the desk interrupted and pushed at the lock of hair he was trying to use to cover his bald spot. His blue eyes were faded and the crow’s-feet at their corners seemed to be growing new legs the longer he was in the room. His nameplate read Merle Nelson. “We vet our employees very well. They are all smart, efficient and well paid, but mistakes do happen. We do know it wasn’t a case of an employee intentionally replacing samples.”

      “Intentional or not this is a little more than a ‘mistake,’ though, don’t you think?” Paige couldn’t believe the man was talking as if this happened every day.

      Mr. Nelson СКАЧАТЬ