Where the Blame Lies(92)

Emery and Jeb Davies nodded in unison, something desperate in their gaze. She knew what it was. She looked away. These were memories. But none of hers. Because she’d been robbed. She deserved the memories she’d make now. And her son deserved to know his mother.

Didn’t he?

She handed the album to Emery but the woman gestured no. “It’s yours. I have copies of all those photos. Please, keep it. I brought it so you could take it home with you.”

Josie slowly took it back. It felt like a consolation prize, like the woman thought the pictures of her son’s life would be enough. They weren’t enough. But she held tightly to it anyway. For right then, it was all she had. “We need to talk about the . . . transfer,” she said. It was such a cold word, but it was the one her attorney had used, and so it was the one she used as well. Defeat appeared on Emery’s face and Josie saw that Jeb tightened his hold on her hand. A tear rolled down the woman’s cheek, but she sat up straight, obviously pulling herself together. Despite herself, admiration rose inside Josie. Emery Davies wasn’t going to crumble. At least not now.

“Please let us tell him,” Emery Davies said softly. “Please. Just give us a week. He doesn’t even know he’s adopted, yet. We were . . . waiting for the right time. And now . . . well, it will all be a blow. A terrible blow. Please, just a week, it’s all we ask,” she said, her voice breaking on the last word.

Josie measured her for a moment, watching the woman struggle, her heart softening even if she didn’t necessarily want it to. It was far more simple to see these people as adversaries than as allies. She knew eventually she would have to see them as the latter for her son’s sake, but right then, she had to do what was easiest or risk falling apart. She nodded. She needed a few days anyway. The last couple had been a whirlwind of emotions and lawyers, and meetings with the police as they broke down exactly how the crime of Caleb’s illegal adoption had been committed. She’d fallen into bed each night and slept like the dead. She still needed to get a room set up for Caleb, figure out how to enroll him in school . . . “Yes, of course. Take a week.” She stood. “My lawyer will be in touch.”

Emery and Jeb Davies stood shakily, and the lawyers followed suit. At the haunted look in Emery’s eyes, Josie again had the sudden desire to reach out to the woman, to comfort her, but she didn’t. She glanced at Zach and he was looking between them, his expression worried, deep conflict in his eyes.

They left the office, and Josie walked with Zach down the hall and outside into the warm, clear day. They headed toward his car and got inside. When he didn’t immediately start the ignition, she turned, looking at him questioningly. “Are you sure about this?” he asked softly.

She tensed, drew back. “What do you mean, am I sure? God, Zach, I thought you of all people would be on my side here.”

He turned to her, his eyes intense. “I am on your side. Only your side.” He massaged the back of his neck that way he did. “But, Josie, I’m adopted too. I just . . .” He exhaled a pent-up breath. “I always knew I was adopted, but even so, I can’t imagine what it would have felt like to be ripped away from the only family I’d ever known at eight years old. It would have been . . . God, those people were my whole world, Josie. My family. My safety.”

Bitterness and hurt warred in her chest. What he said made her feel like nothing, like she had no right to the child who had been cruelly stolen from her, the child she’d yearned for since he’d been torn from her arms. She knew she was being unfair. She knew it. Zach was just expressing his concerns to her, but she couldn’t help the deep sense of . . . betrayal his words were eliciting. She looked away, out the window. “Of course it will be hard. Don’t you think I know that?” Tears threatened but she held them back. “I’ll get him counseling if I have to. It will take time. I’m prepared for that. But he’s my child, Zach. Mine. And he deserves to know me too.”

She flashed back suddenly to the moment they’d been separated, their cries blending as they’d wailed for each other. Didn’t her child carry that heartbreak too? Wasn’t there something visceral inside of him, a nameless longing that would only be made right by their reunion? Or did she carry that grief alone? For a moment she felt such crushing loneliness she didn’t think she could bear it. “I will not stop fighting for him,” she whispered. “I can’t.” I don’t know how.

“Josie,” he said, his voice throaty as he reached for her. She let him take her hands in his, but they sat limply in his grasp. He looked defeated, still torn. “Stay at my apartment again tonight or I can stay with you.”

She looked away from him, out the front window, feeling empty suddenly, drained of the intense joy she’d been feeling the last few days as she’d basked in the knowledge that she’d found her son, that she was getting him back. She sighed, shook her head, but squeezed Zach’s hands before letting go. “I need to go home. And . . . I need to be alone, Zach. I need that, just for a couple of days.”

His gaze shot to her then. “You can’t be alone. He’s out there.”

Her heart sped. In her short haze of happiness, the whirl of meetings, and information, and planning and dreaming, she’d almost convinced herself Charles Hartsman was gone for good. But she knew very well Reagan was still out there, still counting on the police to find her. Zach had been working around the clock following each flimsy lead they had. The police were currently searching every empty or abandoned house in the city of Cincinnati but hadn’t hit on anything yet.