Into the Storm (Signal Bend #3)(79)
A weight Shannon had carried for twenty years, so long that it had become a part of her, fused to her consciousness, suddenly lifted, and tears were on her so fast she nearly choked on them. Dropping her fork to the table, where it clattered against the little china dessert plate, she put her hands to her throat. The soreness she found there reminded her of Keith and Show, and served as sufficient distraction for her to pull back the sobs and compose herself.
But her daughter regarded her with concern. “I’m sorry, did I say something wrong?”
Shannon smiled and reached her hand out across the corner of the table, stopping just short of Adrienne’s hand. “No.” She took a calming breath. “It’s…the reason I didn’t want to meet you. I was afraid that I’d left you to a sad life. I was afraid you’d be hurt and angry. I was afraid I’d done the wrong thing.
From the time I did it, I was afraid.”
Adrienne smiled and shook her head. “No. My parents are awesome.” A little cloud passed quickly through her eyes then. “Were, or…something.” She huffed and sat up straight. “My mom died a few years ago. But my dad is still awesome.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
She shrugged. “That’s when I started to want to find you. Why I’m here, I guess. I always knew I was adopted. My dad is Jamaican, and my mom had brown hair and brown eyes, so it was never exactly a mystery. I look like I came from Brigadoon. And my little brothers are Korean. We have a family joke about being our own United Nations.”
Shannon laughed, feeling abuzz with relief.
“Anyway, when my mom died, and we were going through all the old family pictures and stuff for the memorial, we found a journal she’d written when they were trying to have a baby, and then when they were trying to adopt. Even my dad never knew about it. It made me love her and miss her even more. And it made me curious about you.”
She’d been staring at the picked-at cake in front of her as she’d spoken; now she raised her eyes to Shannon’s. They were bright with unshed tears, but she was smiling. “I never really thought about it when I was growing up. She was just my mom. She was cool and annoying and I loved her and sometimes I hated her. Even though I knew she wasn’t my bio-mom, I never thought of her as not my mom. I never thought of what she went through because she couldn’t have a baby herself.”
Adrienne’s voice cracked, and she stopped, took a sip from her coffee cup. She lingered over that sip for an extra beat, then met Shannon’s eyes again. “I mainly wanted to find you to thank you. You made my mom really happy.”
Shannon had been pushing back tears since Adrienne had said that she was happy. Now, at those last sentences, she lost the battle utterly. She folded her arms on the table, dropped her head on them and bawled. When she felt Adrienne’s hand on her arm, she bawled harder. She couldn’t have stopped for anything in the world.
She cried until the tears ebbed on their own, and then she stood and grabbed a tea towel from a drawer to wipe her soaked face. Adrienne sat and watched her, but said nothing more.
When Shannon sat back down, she reached across the table again, and this time, she took Adrienne’s hand and gave it a quick squeeze. “Sorry about that. That was twenty years of fear and regret flushing away.”
Her daughter looked serious and sad. “I’m sorry you were afraid. I know it probably sounds like I’m looking for a new mom, but I’m so not. I had the only mom I ever want. I understand if you don’t want us to know each other. I know that you wanted a closed adoption, and it wasn’t nice of me to force this on you. So I’ll go. I just needed you to know. It helps me with…losing my mom. That’s selfish, though, and I’m sorry.”
Shannon shook her head, the gesture growing more emphatic. “The only reason I didn’t want to meet you was my fear. If you want to know me, then I’m very good with that. I don’t want to be your mom. It sounds like you definitely got the right side of the mom deal. Whatever you want.”
“Can I…stay for a couple of days? You don’t have to entertain me, but maybe we could talk a little?”
“Absolutely. Stay as long as you like. Your father knows where you are, I take it?”
She laughed. “Oh, yeah. I have to text him three times a day or he panics.”
Shannon laughed with her. For what seemed like the fiftieth time in the past day, her life had changed again. Everything she’d known about herself felt like it had been upended and resettled, all of it shifting into a slightly new position. She felt unglued and restored.
She asked, “How about a walk around the grounds?”
With a smile and a nod, Adrienne rose from the table with her, and they headed out back to the garden.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Show sat at the bar with Isaac and Bart, a bottle of Jack and three glasses before them, while Tasha Westby, a doctor, friend of the MC, and Isaac’s old flame, patched Keith up in Show’s dorm room. He was going to be fine. Maybe he wouldn’t be quite so pretty, but Show didn’t mind that at all. The bastard was conscious and chastened, and he’d sworn he wasn’t going to cause any more trouble.
He seemed legitimately sorry for having hurt Shannon. Show didn’t put much stock his regret, but it was keeping him alive—that and his promise to get his ass back to Tulsa and stay there.