Page 10 of Stolen Mate

After going through the pantry, she made a comprehensive inventory of what was needed. She considered one of the delivery services for a lot of the mundane, run-of-the-mill groceries and supplies, but decided to go to Pike Place Market for produce, cheese, meat, fish, and wine—lots of wine.

Heading from the kitchen to her bedroom, she passed by the coffee table with the journal, stopping to stare at it. It was just a leather-bound book filled with pages of the scribblings of a mad woman. The woman had to be crazy, right? The strange things contained within those pages were nuts—and yet they seemed to resonate with her.

Who was this stranger her dying mother deemed so important that she had spent her final words, her final moments on this earth imploring Tess to read her journals? And why did her mother think she needed forgiveness? Maybe I need to talk to someone; maybe I need grief counseling. But what she was feeling wasn’t grief—there was a relief that came when a loved one’s suffering had ended, and that’s what Tess was feeling.

Tess felt a deep need to figure out why her mother had seemed obsessed with the journal and the woman who wrote it. Maybe she did need to talk to someone to make some sense of it. But who could she talk to without them thinking her mother—the woman who raised her—was nuts? She could continue to talk to herself, both out loud and in her head, but feared it made her look and feel just a little bit crazy.

Otter Cove. Was that where her people were from?

All of her internal musings and confusion were interrupted when her cell phone rang. It was Lara. She knew by both the ringtone and the fact that the sky was beginning to lighten, the first rays of the sun creeping out to play over the surface of the Sound. Damn, she’d been up all night.

“What are you doing?” her sister asked cheerfully.

“What makes you think you’re not waking me up?”

“Because I’m down on the street and I can see your lights are on.”

“What are you doing here at this hour?”

“I was thinking you probably weren’t sleeping well either, so I thought I’d drive by and if I was right, we could run up to Snoqualmie Falls and grab some breakfast at that little place Mom always liked.”

“The one with the terrible food?”

“That’s the one, but Mom liked it.”

Tess smiled. Her sister knew her too well. “Let me pull on clothes I can be seen in.”

After doing just that, she ran downstairs and hugged her sister. “You know it’s obscenely early.”

“I know. I may even be a little late to work, but I just wanted to do something we used to do with mom; I don’t have surgery today and don’t see patients until later. Come on.”

Tess joined Lara in her truck and the two headed east over the bridge to Snoqualmie Falls.

“So, have you looked into those journals? It didn’t look like Mom’s handwriting.”

“It isn’t. I think they may have belonged to my birth mother.”

“When I saw Mom hadn’t written them, I wondered if that might be it.”

“Do you think there’s any chance that my adoption was illegal?” Tess asked, carefully observing her sister’s face in the growing light of the morning.

“Yeah, I do. I wondered about it when I needed a copy of your birth certificate, and she got really funny about it.”

“I have one, and it’s from Alaska.”

“I know, but there was something about it that struck me as odd, and when I asked, she got all flustered.”

“Mom didn’t get flustered,” observed Tess.

“She did if she didn’t want you to know something—like where she hid presents or when she was getting diagnosed…”

Tess reached over to squeeze her sister’s arm. “It’s okay, Lara. I think she didn’t want us to worry until she knew for sure.”

For the rest of the way they drove with the radio turned up, singing to songs on their shared Pandora playlist. They both had respectable voices and tended to naturally harmonize with one another.

Once they were inside the little diner with the dreadful food, were seated, and had ordered, Tess said, “I was a little surprised that my birth mother seems to be from Otter Cove over on the mainland. Their last trip was to Kodiak Island.”

“Yeah, I think I knew that.”

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