One More Taste (One and Only Texas #2)(82)
“He is. Let me see if he’s available now. Who may I tell him is here?”
“Emily.” She huffed. Not today, she wasn’t. “No, wait. He would know me as Rebecca. Rebecca Youngston.”
She disappeared through a door behind her desk. Emily walked to the window and settled her gaze on a sailboat that was little more than a white speck in the vast blue-gray water.
In a matter of moments, the door opened again. “Rebecca, could that really be you?” said a male voice.
Emily turned, but she was too nervous to smile.
Charles Welk had gone gray since she’d last seen him and now sported a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper mustache, but she would have recognized his lanky frame and moneyed air anywhere. He looked like maybe he wanted to hug her, so she thrust out her hand between them, which he accepted.
“My God, I can’t wait to hear where you’ve been and what you’ve been up to.”
Not so fast, buddy. If he wanted to catch up for old time’s sake, then he was going to be sorely disappointed because Emily had too much on her mind to make small talk, not that she was any good at it anyway. “Could we talk in your office?”
If he was startled by her abruptness, he showed no sign of it. “Of course. After you. Sheri, hold my calls, please.”
Welk’s office afforded the same stunning view of the lake, but Emily forced herself to sit in one of the chairs facing his ornate French Provincial desk rather than distract herself with the view.
“I was told by Louis, the doorman at my parents’ apartment, that they’d passed away. He gave me your card.”
“Louis always did have your family’s best interests at heart. He’s a fine man.”
Oh, the urge to take Charles Welk by the lapels, give him a good shake, and command him to stop dancing around with small talk and spit it out about why he’d wanted to talk to her. “He said you wanted to speak to me, that you had something for me.”
Welk took a long, studying look at her, clearly deliberating whether to keep pursuing a chatty conversation or indulge her by getting straight to the matter at hand. “You father died shortly after you left home,” he said. “I’m not saying that so you’ll blame yourself. He and I were friends and colleagues, but he was a hard man and he never did right by you or your mother. Everything that happened to him, he brought on himself.”
Truer words had never been spoken, though the news left her surprisingly angry all over again. Not at her father, but at herself, for expending so much energy and thought evading her parents only to find out it was an imagined threat. Nothing but a ghost. “And my mother?”
For the first time, Welk’s expression shifted away from cheery professionalism. “Breast cancer took her from the world, from me, too soon. Two years ago.” He fiddled with a wedding band on his left ring finger.
Had her mother remarried her father’s best friend? Charles Welk had always seemed like a decent guy. It felt nice, imagining her mother finding companionship and enjoying a few happy years after her father died. “You two were … close?”
“In the years after Bernard died, we took solace in each other. We were a good match. Married for four years.”
“Then I’m sorry for your loss.” What an ironic world she lived in, to comfort a virtual stranger about the loss of her own mother.
Welk nodded. “Thank you. And to you. I like to think I made her happy. I did my best to help her achieve that goal every day, even after the diagnosis. Life really is so short. Happiness is the only thing that makes the brevity bearable. But she never got over losing you. She’d want me to tell you that we never stopped looking for you.”
“That’s … I don’t know what to say.” Emily dropped her chin, not sure how to feel about that. The safest thing seemed to be to put that kernel of truth in a locked box in her mind to deal with later.
“You don’t have to say anything. I’m sure this is all quite overwhelming. We finally concluded that you’d changed your identity because there were no Rebeccas in the country, living or deceased, who matched your age or description.”
“I did change it, yes,” Emily said.
“Then may I congratulate you for a job well done because we searched long and hard for you, using the best experts in the country, for any possible aliases. And always came up completely empty.” He punctuated the words with a genuine smile of respect.
“Thank you.” She’d always known that the pricey forger she’d hired had been well worth his fee. She’d poured the vast majority of the money she’d stolen from her parents and withdrawn from her savings account into that forged identity. She hadn’t merely wanted to hide, but to recast herself as someone entirely new and sustainable. Emily Ford was a tax-paying, social security contributing, upstanding member of society.
“Is there anything you want to know before we get down to business?”
“No, thank you.”
“Fair enough.” He perched a pair of reading glasses on his nose. “Your mother left a substantial sum of money for you. From the sale of properties, both your parents’ retirement funds, and their investments. She trusted me to hold on to it for you and to issue payment if you ever emerged from hiding.”
The words made her skin tingle. She really had been hiding all these years. Not only from her parents but also from herself and the world. It had taken Knox and her feelings for him to push her out of her safe little nest.