Nothing to Lose (J.P. Beaumont #25)(19)

I had to give the girl credit for gumption. Hearing her claim she’d had more than one lover must have been a stunner for her father. It’s a wonder he hadn’t suffered a coronary on the spot.

“That must have sent your father around the bend,” I suggested.

Nitz nodded. “Absolutely,” she said. “Dad had always been a bully. I’d spent years watching him boss my mother around. I hated it that she always gave in to him no matter what. I decided my best bet was to fight fire with fire.”

“What happened next?” I asked. “I suppose he demanded paternity tests all around?”

Nitz shook her head. “Nope, I didn’t give him a chance. I had seen him angry before, but never that angry. I decided to get the hell out of there, so I went to my room, loaded some clothes into a backpack, and let myself out through my bedroom window. I’d gotten pretty adept at that by then,” she added with a grin.

“Did Chris know about any of this—the pregnancy test, I mean?”

Again Nitz shook her head. “He was at work that night. I knew he couldn’t talk on the phone, so I left a message saying I needed to talk to him. He never called me back.”

“He had no idea you were pregnant?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What happened then?”

“I went to his place, expecting Chris to turn up there as soon as he got off shift, but he didn’t. I waited around as long as I could, but it was freezing cold. Finally I left another message. Then, since I couldn’t very well go back home, I walked out to the highway and caught a ride to Anchorage.”

“You hitchhiked from Homer to Anchorage?” I demanded in disbelief. “In the middle of the night?”

“And in the snow,” she added.

“How far is it from here to there?”

“Four and a half hours, give or take. It turns out that the guy who gave me a ride was someone I knew from school, so it wasn’t like I rode with a complete stranger. He gave me a ride to Aunt Penny and Uncle Wally’s place and dropped me off there.”

“And they are?”

“Penny and Wally Olmstead,” Danitza explained. “Penny is my mother’s younger sister. My mom always claimed that Penny was her mother’s ‘change of life baby,’ and the two of them were fifteen years apart. Penny’s only eight years older than I am, so as I was growing up, she was more like an older sister to me than she was an aunt. When I showed up on her doorstep early the next morning and told them what had happened, she and her new husband took me in. I stayed with them for the next five years.

“They’d never had any kids of their own, but once James was born, they looked after him while I went back to school. Uncle Wally was a counselor at West Anchorage High. He helped me get my GED and managed to find a scholarship that allowed me to enroll in the nursing program at the UAA—the University of Alaska Anchorage. I worked while I was going to school, of course, but I never would have been able to manage on my own without their help.”

“Did you keep reaching out to Chris?”

Danitza nodded. “I kept calling his number and texting him, too, but I never heard back from him. Eventually I got a recorded message that the number was no longer in service.”

“So you’re saying Chris did have a cell phone?”

Danitza nodded. “He couldn’t afford either an iPhone or a calling plan, so I gave him what they call a burner for his birthday and paid for it out of my allowance.”

As a kid I never had the luxury of being given an allowance. My mother couldn’t afford it. If Danitza’s allowance had been generous enough that she could afford to provide her boyfriend with a cell phone, she had grown up in far more luxurious circumstances than I, and I respected her that much more for walking away from all that in order to keep her child. And the fact that Chris had been in possession of a phone made me feel as though we were making progress. Maybe even years after the fact, there might be a way to track his phone’s location.

“You wouldn’t happen to remember the number, would you?” I asked.

Danitza picked up her phone, tapped a few buttons, and then handed it over to me. She had her contacts list open to a page that said “Chris.” No last name was given, but there was a phone number. I jotted it down and then returned the device to her.

“I’m surprised you kept his number,” I said.

She nodded. “Whenever I’ve gotten a new phone, I’ve kept his number and all his messages and texts, too. I kept them for Jimmy so that someday, when he’s a little older, he’ll be able to hear the sound of his father’s voice.”

That touched me, and I had to swallow the lump that suddenly caught in my throat. When I spoke again, I changed the subject. “So you thought Chris had gone off to Ohio and that eventually he’d come back?”

Danitza nodded. “I believed it as long as I could. In fact, until this morning when I met you, I still hoped it was true—that somehow he was still alive and well out there somewhere, living his life without me. In fact, that’s why I named our son Christopher, so that if Chris ever came looking and found that name, he’d know it was us.”

“But he never did.”

“No,” she agreed quietly. “He never did, and although my son’s first name is Christopher, he goes by James or Jimmy. Calling him Christopher hurt too much.”