The Secret Sin by Darlene Gardner Page B

was.
    She stopped abruptly. The path was wider here, with a fallen log just about the right height to sit on. She remained standing, but he got the impression she’d sat on that very log before.
    She wasn’t wearing a ball cap today. A ray of sunlight beamed down through the trees, striking her shoulder-length hair and turning it even more golden. He remembered how he used to be on the lookout for that blond hair in the halls of their high school, but she’d been as adept at avoiding him before their single night together as she had been afterward.
    He waited for her to begin, visually assessing the scrape on her leg and the bruise on her arm. She was probably still smarting, but the injuries didn’t look serious. She seemed to be having trouble finding words.
    “I know why you wanted to talk to me alone,” he said, helping her out.
    He could see her throat constrict. “You do?”
    “It’s about Lindsey, right?”
    She nodded, her eyes growing huge.
    “I’d keep monitoring her, but I don’t see this as a big problem. She’s fixated on her weight, but she doesn’t seem to have an eating disorder.”
    “An eating disorder,” Annie repeated.
    “I didn’t see any signs of one, which doesn’t mean she’s not at risk of developing—”
    “Stop,” she interrupted, holding up a hand.
    “Stop?”
    “That’s not what I wanted to talk about.” Annie’s upper teeth chewed her lower lip. She crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself. He had absolutely no idea what she would say.
    “Lindsey’s the baby we gave up for adoption.”
    The words hung in the air between them like the fog that sometimes blanketed the Pocono Mountains.
    “I found out yesterday just before I talked to you at the pediatrician’s office,” she said in a rush. “I should have told you then, but I wasn’t used to the idea myself. I’m still not.”
    His brain whirred, trying to put the pieces together and not able to make them fit. “Lindsey can’t be our baby. She’s fifteen.”
    “She lied about her age so she could travel alone on the train,” Annie said. “She turned thirteen in March.”
    The birthday of the baby they’d given up for adoption had been five months ago. Even though he tried to live in the present, he’d marked the date in some way or another over the past thirteen years, sometimes with alcohol, always with guilt.
    He sank onto the log, wrestling with the revelation, still trying to make sense of it. He’d never expected to lay eyes on their baby in his lifetime. “Lindsey really is our daughter?”
    “Not our daughter,” Annie said. “We gave up all rights to her. She’s Ted Thompson’s daughter.”
    “I don’t understand. I thought it was a closed adoption.”
    “I thought so too until yesterday.” She plucked a leaffrom a nearby branch, then crushed it in her palm. “It seems my father let the daughter of one of his friends adopt her. He’s been visiting her for years.”
    “Ted Thompson’s wife?” he asked, still feeling as though he was wading through fog.
    “His first wife. She died eight years ago of breast cancer. Lindsey lives with her adoptive father and his second wife.”
    He digested the information. He’d spent the duration of Annie’s pregnancy in a study-abroad program in Spain. Since Annie wouldn’t take his calls, his mother had kept him informed of developments. She’d relayed that Annie’s father had been tasked with handling the adoption.
    “What my father did was unforgivable,” Annie said. “You have every right to be angry with him.”
    “Angry?” Ryan searched inside himself but anger wasn’t the emotion coursing through him. “I’m not angry.”
    “Betrayed, then,” she said. “My father had no right to do what he did.”
    Betrayal wasn’t what he was feeling, either. Something bright and buoyant burst inside him, so powerful it felt as though it was warming him from within.
    “Your father was wrong,” Ryan acknowledged, then spoke what was