A Missing Heart(42)

“It’s…Cameron, now,” she says, breaking her gaze from mine.

“Cameron,” I repeat—not as a question but as a statement. I need to hear the way her name sounds on my tongue after never calling this person I thought I knew so well by the very name she was born with. “Suits you.”

She wraps a strand of her flawlessly curled hair behind her ear. “Yeah, I guess.”

“So, what brings you all the way back to this quaint little New England town? Surely, it can’t be me.” I laugh, because if it were me, why wait almost thirteen years?

Cammy—Cameron, looks down to her feet as I question her visit. “I am here because of you,” she says. As if six words couldn’t turn my life completely upside down, I create the space I think I need and take a seat on the couch behind us. “Are you okay?”

“Twelve—thirteen years, Cam. Do you know how many of those days you have crossed my mind?” She’s engaged or married…something, and I’m married with a son. This isn’t okay. But it’s Cammy. My Cammy. But, not my Cameron. Someone else’s Cameron.

She walks over to where I’m sitting and takes a seat beside me. “I’m here because I have something to tell you, something we need to talk about.” The lightness in her voice thickens and an anxious inflection coats the last of her words.

“Are your parents okay?” My mind races right to the thought that something might have happened to one of them, but even if that happened, why would she need to talk to me?

“Of course, they’re both fine. Still the same people, always in my business, always keeping tabs on me. You know them,” she laughs. Yeah, while I should know them—the grandparents of our estranged daughter—I only know of them. She places her hands over her lap and knits each of her fingers tightly together. Her pale skin brightens into a light pink, closely matching her polished nails, and I’m becoming anxious and impatient for her next words.

“I give up, then, what is it?”

Cammy takes in a sharp breath and closes her eyes. “Ever, she’s…she came to find me.”

“Ever?” I feel every muscle on my face tighten, questioning each word that spills out of her mouth. “Ever? You mean our Everything?”

She inhales, placing a long pause between my question and her answer. “It’s really her name, AJ. After you left the hospital room, when I made you leave, the adopting parents insisted that I give our daughter a name. “I could only hear your words playing through my head at that moment: ‘She’s my everything.’ Because of that, I named her, Everything. The adopting parents were a bit put off by my decision, but rather than argue, the woman asked if they could call her Ever for short. It sounded like the most beautiful name.” I want to tear through the house like a tornado with anger and resentment, after all of these years I’m only now finding out that Cammy knew our daughter’s name. But, I’m not moving, and I’m not unleashing because she named her a perfect name. Her name is short for everything, and I’m just short of Everything. “I didn’t tell you because you were already going through so much turmoil, and to be honest, I was seventeen, AJ. I wasn’t making the brightest decisions. I can apologize for the hormonal seventeen-year-old I was, but it won’t change anything now.”

“Wait a second,” I say, stopping all of my thoughts because my world just imploded. It’s spinning around me, and I’m in the center watching my life spiral out of control. “Did you say…our daughter came to find you?”

Cammy lifts her face and I see that her eyes are filled with tears. Her bottom lip juts out slightly, and it’s quivering like the rest of her body is. In an instant, all I see is an upset seventeen-year-old girl. A sound like someone just tied a knot around her throat escapes as she begins to cry, and it breaks everything inside of me. Whenever Cammy cried, I felt like crying too. I couldn’t stand it when the girl I loved was in pain, and I couldn’t do anything to fix it. Her tears still seem to have a similar effect on me. “She came to find me—us.”

I close my eyes, feeling them fill up with tears that I will not be able to control, not if my life were to depend on it. “Did the adoptive parents find you or something? The adoption was closed, and I thought that was the end.”

“No,” Cammy says softly. “It was just Ever.”

“But…only—she’s only—today’s her birthday. She’s only thirteen, and…D.C., she wasn’t living in D.C., right?” I ask, having a hard time putting words together. Everything feels hazy, like I’ve been whacked over the head with something heavy.

“She came to find me on her own. I don’t know how she found me, AJ, but she found me.”

“Where is she now? What does she look like? Is she okay? Is she—” I’m frantic, panicking, completely discombobulated.

Cameron holds her hands up, gesturing for me to relax. “Okay, okay. I know this is a lot. I almost passed out when she came to my front door. It was the strangest thing, AJ. She was standing there, and I could have—should have—assumed she was a random kid, selling Girl Scout cookies or something, but the moment I saw those eyes—your eyes, those crazy Caribbean blue eyes of yours, I knew it was our daughter. I didn’t even confirm it…I just threw my arms around her and didn’t let go for a long time. She let me hold her, AJ. She didn’t make me let go,” she croaks through harder cries.