Page 72 of If You Fight

Chapter Twenty-Two

Serena

Even though Ryder wanted to go with me to see my mother just in case something happened, I chose to see her for the first time alone. I knew he worried about me, especially now since I was pregnant, but this was my mother. She wasn’t going to do any harm to me.

As I drove toward the address in New Windsor the detective gave me, I couldn’t believe she’d been just thirty miles away all this time. Had my father known this?

I knew the truth was he probably had been the one to send her there, but I didn’t want to believe that he’d known she was less than an hour away for all these years as I begged him to find her. My father had never wanted me to see her, but was he really that much a monster to do this?

Whatever he’d done or not done, I’d found her at last, and nothing would stop me from getting to know the woman who’d given birth to me. I wanted to share all those things I’d experienced with her, to see her face when I told her about growing up and then meeting Ryder. I wanted her to be in our child’s life from the very beginning.

My GPS alerted me that I needed to turn left onto a long winding road leading to an enormous grey stone home in the distance. As grand as the one I grew up in, the very sight of it made me happy. I’d worried she had been forced to live in squalor because of my father’s spitefulness, but the house I saw now said otherwise.

Pulling up in front of the home, I marveled at how beautiful her home was. My hands began to shake at the reality that in mere seconds, I’d finally be face-to-face with the one person I’d wanted to see for so long. What would I say first? Would she even recognize me after all these years?

I squeezed the steering wheel tightly and took a deep breath. This is what I’d wanted since I was six years old. I could do this.

But what if Janelle was right? What if she chose to leave us and didn’t want to know her daughters? What if my finding her would be something she hated instead of a surprise she’d love?

Suddenly, I lost my will. I couldn’t bear to finally meet my mother only to have her show me she never missed me at all.

My mouth grew dry, and my emotions began to spin out of control. If she shunned me like my father had always said she did when she left us, I wouldn’t be able to handle it. The single dream I’d kept alive all these years would be dead, and everything my father had said about her would be proven right.

I couldn’t face that.

Putting the car into gear, I looked in the rearview mirror to turn around and leave, but a knock on my car window stopped me. A man with light hair and a big smile who looked to be around my age motioned for me to put down the window. I didn’t want to talk to him, no matter how happy he looked. This had all been a big mistake, and all I wanted to do was go home.

But he knocked again and I didn’t want to just leave him standing there grinning at me without even telling him a lie that I’d gotten lost, so I rolled down the window and returned his smile.

“I’m sorry. I took a wrong turn and before I knew it, I was here. Sorry about that.”

“Oh, it’s no problem, miss. What were you looking for?”

My mind raced to remember a single road name I’d seen along the way, but not one came to mind.

Stammering, I tried to bluff my way out of what had already become an awkward conversation. “Oh…I…I mean…it’s no big deal. I was just looking for a different place.”

The man chuckled. “I got that. But what I’m asking is what house were you looking for? This house sits on twenty-five acres, so wherever you were headed, you missed it by a mile.”

“Or two,” I mumbled, embarrassed by my lame attempt at lying.

We stared at each other in silence for a few moments until he introduced himself. He took his work gloves off and thrust his hand in through the window. “I’m Michael. I work the estate as the chief gardener.”

I shook his calloused hand. “I’m Serena. I was looking for someone who lives here.”

Michael looked puzzled by my statement. “Then you really must have the wrong house. Nobody lives here. At least not in the main house. It’s been empty for years. The man who owns it comes to visit every few months, but other than that, it’s more like a museum than a home.”

Had the private detective gotten the address wrong?

“Oh, well, I guess I should go then and find the right house.”

He stared at me for a moment and shook his head. “You wouldn’t be looking for Alita, would you? I just noticed you look like her.”

“Alita?”

“She lives here, but not in the big house. She lives in the carriage house at the back of the property. I think she’s at home right now.”

The carriage house? Why would my mother not live in the main house?

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