The Secret Sin. Darlene Gardner

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      “Excuse me.” She stood up, grateful for an excuse to get away from Edie. She headed for the exit and privacy, waiting until she was outside on the sidewalk to press the receive button. The door of a gift shop next door was slowly swinging shut behind a customer, and she caught the sweet smell of scented candles.

      “Hello, Dad.” She headed up the hill from the pediatrician’s office, away from a group of window-shopping tourists. As the hour neared five o’clock, the traffic on the street had thickened, the number of cars seemingly out of place on the too narrow quaint street. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

      “I didn’t have my phone with me.” Her father’s voice was scratchy and hard to make out, but it was still wonderful to hear from him. After her mother deserted them when Annie was four years old, they’d grown exceptionally close. “Is something wrong?”

      “Not really.” She got straight to the point. “I called to ask you about Lindsey Thompson.”

      Interference in the connection combined with the incidental street noise made it difficult to tell whether her father had responded.

      “Dad?” Annie prompted. “Are you still there?”

      “What about Lindsey Thompson?” His voice sounded odd, but that could have been due to the poor reception.

      “She phoned from the train station to say she’d come to visit you. She said she knows you through Joe Nowak.”

      There was a long pause before he said, “That’s true.”

      “Why didn’t you ever tell me Helene Nowak had a daughter?” Annie asked. “I’m positive you didn’t mention it when she died.”

      “I didn’t.” The strange vibe remained in his voice. “Where is Lindsey now?”

      “Here in Indigo Springs. With me. There were no trains back to Pittsburgh today so now I’m wondering what to do with a fifteen-year-old.”

      “Lindsey told you she was fifteen?”

      “Isn’t she?”

      “She’s thirteen,” her father said.

      Thirteen.

      The unlucky number flashed in Annie’s mind like a neon warning sign. And just like that, she knew.

      Her muscles clenched and her stomach muscles tightened against the blow that was coming. It was the only way the events of the past few hours made sense.

      “Who is Lindsey Thompson, Dad?” she prompted, her voice already trembling.

      “I didn’t want you to find out this way.”

      She suppressed an urge to toss the cell phone into the street, where the tires of a passing car would smash it. She took a deep breath and smelled exhaust fumes. She forced her vocal chords into action. “Want me to find out what?”

      “She’s your daughter.”

      Annie sank onto the nearest stoop. The traffic continued to pass by while across the street a bell jingled as customers went in and out of an ice-cream shop, the scene the same as it had been moments before.

      But for Annie, everything had changed with three world-shattering words.

      “There you are.” Edie Clark appeared as though she’d materialized out of thin air. “I told the receptionist I’d come out and get you.”

      “Annie?” Her father’s voice came over the phone, urgent and worried. “Are you okay?”

      She wasn’t okay. She’d just discovered the father she’d trusted had let friends adopt her baby, expressly going against her wishes that he arrange a closed adoption. And one of the biggest gossips in Indigo Springs was regarding her with open curiosity. “I can’t talk now, Dad. I’ll call you back later.”

      Annie disconnected the call and summoned the will to stand up, determined to appear normal.

      “Sorry to interrupt your call,” Edie said brightly, “but Ryan’s waiting.”

      She must have misspoken. Annie had gone to the pediatrician specifically to avoid dealing with Ryan Whitmore. “You mean the pediatrician is waiting?”

      “Oh, no. That’s why I asked you about Ryan earlier. His office closes early on Fridays.” Edie indicated the placard on the door behind Annie, and she realized they were in front of Whitmore Family Practice. The office hours that were listed confirmed the office was indeed closed. “Dr. Goldstein had a family emergency, so Ryan’s taking his patients this afternoon.”

      Somehow Annie managed to nod, although her entire body felt numb. She concentrated on placing one foot in front of the other as she followed Edie to the pediatrician’s office, bracing herself for the ordeal to come.

      But how could she possibly prepare to talk to Ryan Whitmore when the girl they’d conceived when they were both only sixteen had inexplicably resurfaced?

       CHAPTER TWO

       R YAN W HITMORE leaned one shoulder against the bright-blue wall outside the examination room, making a notation on young Lindsey Thompson’s chart.

      A pint-sized girl with a mop of dark curls stuck her head around a door frame down the hall from where he stood. She was about four years old. He waved. She giggled, her head disappearing back into the room.

      As soon as he talked in private to whomever had brought in Lindsey, it would be the little girl’s turn.

      The nurse who’d been assisting him came back, walking down the hall with another woman trailing her. Ryan blinked once, then twice, but his eyes weren’t wrong.

      It didn’t matter that the nurse partially obscured his view and a baseball-style cap covered the second woman’s hair. He would have recognized her from a hundred feet away, which was about as close as he’d come to her since they were teenagers.

      “Dr. Whitmore, this is the woman who brought in Lindsey,” the nurse said when they reached him. “Annie—?”

      “Sublinski,” he finished, keeping his eyes trained on Annie, who had yet to meet his gaze. “We went to high school together.”

      “Then you don’t need me,” the nurse said cheerfully. She excused herself as though the chance meeting was nothing out of the ordinary.

      She couldn’t know he and Annie Sublinski had last spoken more than thirteen years ago on the telephone about giving up the baby she was carrying.

      The nurse couldn’t possibly be aware of all the things Ryan had never said to Annie, or the guilt that never quite went away no matter how much he tried to live in the moment.

      He shook off the memories and focused on the present.

      “This is a surprise,” he said.

      She raised her eyes. The color was an unremarkable mixture of brown and green. He was at a loss as to why he’d always found them so fascinating.

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