Page 45 of Tear Me Apart
“I never meant to hurt you. I never meant to hold this back. It was personal. It was a decision I made when I might not have been entirely in my best mind, and once I made it, I couldn’t—wouldn’t—walk away.”
“Tell me.”
So she does. Tells him the whole story, from beginning to end, from Kyle’s hateful indifference and the pregnancies and the miscarriage to the doctor, as dispassionately as she can.
When she finishes, he sighs. “We’ll deal with my hurt feelings soon, but for right now, I agree with Juliet. We have to find Mindy’s real mother.”
“Iamher real mother.” The words rip out of her in a snarl, and Jasper holds up a hand.
“Biological, babe. That’s all I meant. You’re not in a position to attack me, you know. I’m behaving very rationally for a man who’s just found out his wife’s been lying to him for seventeen years.”
“You are, and I’m sorry.” The timer dings, the bread is done. “Let’s eat. Then—”
“Then we will look for this woman, whether you like it or not.” She starts to interrupt, but he shakes his head. “Lauren, you don’t have a choice anymore. This is bigger than you, your feelings, your pride. We must do whatever it takes to save Mindy’s life.”
“You can’t tell her. You can never tell her.”
He shakes his head again. “The time for secrets is over. We are going to tell her. She loves you. No one could ever take your place.”
“Are you thinking clearly, Jasper? Because I don’t think you are. If we tell Mindy I adopted her, we’ll also have to tell her you’re not her real father. Are you ready for that? We’ve always promised not to share that with her, and now you want to drop the biggest bombshell of her life on top of a potentially fatal disease. She’s seventeen, for heaven’s sake. Even though you think she’s Supergirl, she’s just a seventeen-year-old child who is sick, and might die.”
Genuine pain crosses his face as if her words have been attached to an anvil smashing into his stomach. “Honey, listen to me. This couldn’t have happened in a worse way, I’ll grant you that, but Mindy isn’t stupid. I think she already suspects. She asked me for a book on DNA. She said it was because she was thinking about following Juliet’s steps into the CBI, but I think she wants to understand what her charts are saying. Maybe she senses this, maybe she’s always wondered. Who knows? But she has the right to know her true heritage. And she has the right to the hope that we can find her a match. It’s our duty now. We must put our personal stakes aside and do what’s right by our daughter.”
“You’ve changed your tune. You always said—”
“Circumstances have changed, Lauren. I can’t save my daughter’s life with my blood, and now I know why you can’t, either. So yes, I’ve changed my tune. She’s old enough to know the truth. And we are going to tell her.”
Lauren serves their meal stiffly, silently furious. She can’t let Mindy know. She just can’t. She will do anything she has to, anything, to keep the truth from her.
24
Lauren finds sleep impossible. The bed is too comfortable, the room too dark and quiet. Jasper’s gentle snores and the roaring wind in the trees outside feel like a jackhammer to her brain.
She gets up slowly so as not to wake her sainted husband, wraps herself in his discarded sweater, and steals to her office on the first floor. It is chilly but she welcomes the discomfort, it helps her relax a bit.
He took it so well, the news she wasn’t Mindy’s biological mother. Outside of his desire to tell Mindy the whole truth, he’s handled the revelation better than expected. Oh, she could tell he was furious, ready to burst into screams, but he’d kept himself under control. They sniped at each other the rest of the evening until she locked herself in the bath and he stomped off to clear the snow from the decks. But that was to be expected.
The problem is Jasper’s planned next steps. He doesn’t understand her reluctance to share the news with Mindy. She has to make him see the light.
Lauren will not—cannot—run the risk of losing her daughter to a technicality.
She peels the bandage away from her arm. The cut is ragged, nonuniform. It bisects the other scars, long faded, scars few people outside the family know are there. Everyone who’s ever seen them has been told they occurred in a car accident when she was young. Arm through the glass windshield. Tons of tiny little cuts. The scars so pale now that no one but Lauren can see them.
The scratch has crusted over. She runs the pad of her finger over it, feels the bumpy line. Pulls at the edge of the scab until a bead of bright red blood appears. She touches the tip of her finger to it, brings the smear of red to her tongue. Takes a deep breath and puts the bandage back into place.
Her laptop is completely out of battery. She plugs it in and gives it a few minutes to charge, then opens her email. It has been piling up. Even though she’s looked at the account occasionally on her phone, she’s let it grow wild, and now it needs to be pruned back.
Fifteen minutes later, after ruthlessly deleting every email from a stranger or a store, she is left with five. Two are from friends checking in on Mindy, asking if they can bring dinners by, or help in any way. The other three are nothing of note, class schedules for an art program she is involved with, a homeschool standardized test notice. She answers them all quickly and efficiently, then turns her browser to private so the internet’s bots won’t track her. In Google, she types in a name she hasn’t thought about in a very, very long time.
She types and searches and clicks and reads until she is satisfied.
Her secret is safe. She lets out the breath she’s been holding all day.
“Babe, what are you doing? It’s three in the morning.”
Lauren jumps in her seat and slaps the lid of the laptop down. Jasper stands in the doorway to her office, rumpled, yawning, his face a mask of confusion.
“My God, you scared me. I’m sorry, did I wake you?”
