Page 32 of Rufus

A question Serena had dismissed as being unnecessary, stating an adult Molly must know what had happened to him.

That was the problem. Molly didn’t know for certain what had happened to Ronan, which was the reason she had asked Rufus to see if he could find him.

It seemed Serena Jenkins wasn’t about to confirm or deny Molly’s suspicions as she continued.

“I’ve taken an interest in and received a monthly report on Mia Kingston’s life since her much-publicized reunion with her birth father two years ago,” she had said dismissively with a curl of her glossy top lip. “I could hardly believe my eyes when the report from a month ago included an article and photographs from a magazine featuring the animal shelter Mia Kingston owns. Because there, in full color, was a grown-up you, standing in the background of one of those photographs. I suppose they ran the article because Mia became something of a celebrity in her own right when the news broke that she’s actually Emily Wynter, the daughter of the millionaire Rufus Wynter and his deceased wife, Elizabeth,” she added disinterestedly.

Molly had wanted to hit her mother then, to scream and shout at her obvious callousness in regard to a situation that had caused Rufus and Mia so much suffering.

Instead, she’d remained quiet and allowed her mother to continue confirming things that Molly hadn’t known as a child and had only been able to guess at as an adult, but never had any way of confirming.

Until now.

“It was just too good an opportunity to resist that day when the two of us returned to the car park where I’d left the car while we went shopping, and I saw the woman I later learned was Elizabeth Wynter. She hadn’t as yet strapped her baby’s seat into the back of her car. I started a conversation with her, asked if she needed any help, which she refused. But you always were such a cute little thing. So tiny, almost doll-like, with those bright blue eyes and glossy black hair. You always succeeded in distracting the mothers.”

No! Molly had inwardly protested in horror.

“While the mother was cooing over how cute you were in your pretty blue dress that matched the color of your eyes, it took me mere seconds to remove the baby in the seat from her vehicle and strap it into the back of my own. Unfortunately, once the mother had watched to make sure you made the walk safely back to our car, she then realized her baby was missing. She immediately tried to stop our car from leaving, but when she realized that wasn’t happening, she then gave chase in her own car. I hadn’t had time to strap you in, so you bounced around in the back seat for a while until you managed to secure the seat belt yourself. Such a pity the mother was then killed in the terrible fiery pile-up of vehicles on the motorway. I was just ahead of her and missed it, thank God. But photographs of both her and her baby appeared in the newspapers for days, weeks, after the tragedy, along with ones of the poor, devastated widower.”

Serena had given a disgusted tusk.

“That amount of publicity meant I was stuck with the baby until the heat died down on the tragic story, because there was always the possibility of Emily being recognized. I know you did your bit to look after her, but you were only five, and there were limits to how much you could do. Three months of tolerating the demands of a stinky crying baby and I couldn’t take it anymore. I drove down to Cornwall, far away from London, and abandoned her in a church there.”

She gave a triumphant smile, as if it hadn’t broken Molly’s heart that day to realize the baby she had been caring for—who she now knew to have been Mia Kingston—was no longer living with them and wouldn’t be coming back.

“Ironically, no one made the connection between the Wynter baby and the abandoned one, so I could have sold her on after all,” Serena dismissed. “I’ve since learned she remained in an orphanage until she aged out of the system at eighteen. As you did. It would have been the height of fucking irony if the two of you had ended up in the same orphanage five years later,” she had added callously.

By this time, the tears were cascading unchecked down Molly’s cheeks.

The other woman had confirmed what Molly had long suspected. Primarily that her mother was a monster, one who felt no remorse for the fact Beth Wynter had died while trying to rescue her baby. Her comment about Molly’s cuteness “always distracting the mothers” implied Sarah Harper had taken more babies than Emily and Ronan.

Worse, it seemed Serena had deliberately used Molly to help her in that endeavor.

“I had to give the money back on that occasion. No baby, no sale. It was always wealthy couples requesting babies, of course, ones who didn’t meet the adoption criteria or simply weren’t willing to wait for a baby to become available. All the same to me, as long as they paid me generously for the privilege.”

Molly doubted that her mother had ever cared to find out specifically why those couples didn’t meet the adoption agency’s high standards.

Before now, she’d never had any way of confirming her suspicions about Ronan and Emily, but she’d begun to seriously question them when she’d seen the reunion between Rufus Wynter and his daughter in the newspapers two years ago. She’d realized from the timing of when Emily was supposed to have died, plus her age then and now, that it could all be connected to her own past.

Because Emily/Mia Wynter, née Kingston, was a beautiful red-haired woman, with the most beautiful eyes, green with a surrounding ring of turquoise.

Exactly the same hair and eye color as the baby Molly’s mother had brought home twenty years previously, whom Molly had doted on and believed to be her sister, before that baby was just as suddenly taken away from her.

As a young child, Molly hadn’t been able to gauge how many weeks Mia had been with them. It was only as an adult that she had learned it must have been the three months unaccounted for in Mia’s life.

“You should have stayed away from Mia and her family, Molly,” Serena Jenkins had chided her. “If you had, I wouldn’t need to be paying you a visit now.”

It hadn’t initially been Molly’s intention to seek out Mia or Rufus. At least, she didn’t think it had…

For almost two years after the reunion of father and daughter, and despite the aching in her chest to do so, Molly had resisted going anywhere near the newly reunited father and daughter. But it seemed that each step she took, each job offer she accepted, brought her ever closer to London. To where she knew Mia now owned and ran an animal shelter.

Seeing the vacancy in a job agency window had been too much of a temptation for Molly to be able to resist. Nor could she bring herself to say no when Mia had offered her the job and use of the apartment above the main building.

Because she had known with absolute certainty, just from that one meeting, that Mia Kingston was the same person Molly had once believed to be her baby sister. The reason she was so sure of that was because the moment she had met Mia again, she had been filled with the same wave of sibling love as she had felt for that baby twenty-two years previously.

The woman who now called herself Serena Jenkins had today confirmed every horrific suspicion, and more, that Molly had ever had regarding those events in her childhood.

The more being that the other woman had now revealed she’d used Molly’s looks and innocence as a distraction to enable her to carry out those despicable crimes.

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