Somewhere Out There(89)

Her mother smiled then. “Thank you, honey.” She paused. “I wish I did know more about your birth mother, but I don’t.” She gave Natalie a thoughtful look. “Does Brooke? Has she ever tried to find her?”

“Other than putting her information on the adoption registry that helped me find her, no.”

“Did the background check Kyle ran on Brooke tell you anything?”

Natalie froze, staring at her mother in disbelief. “The what?”

“Oh,” her mom said. Her cheeks flushed and she began blinking fast. “I thought you knew.”

“He ran a background check on Brooke?” Natalie said. She clenched her jaw, seething at the thought of what Kyle had done without her knowledge. “When? And how did you know about it?”

“Your father mentioned it,” she said. “I’m sure Kyle meant to tell you, honey. Maybe he was just waiting for the results.”

“I doubt that,” Natalie said. She stood up. “Sorry, Mom, but I need to go.”

Her mother stood as well. “Honey, wait. Maybe you should try and calm down first.”

“I’ll be fine.” Natalie kissed her mother on the cheek and walked out the door. She drove home as quickly as she could, gripping the wheel hard enough to turn her knuckles white. How could he do this without telling her? He didn’t trust her judgment. He lied to her.

Once she parked in the driveway, Natalie grabbed her purse and headed inside, her arms swinging at her sides. “Mommy!” Henry said, leaping off the couch and racing toward her. He threw himself against her legs and locked on with all four of his limbs.

“Not now, sweetie,” Natalie said, bending down to extricate her son’s grip. “Where’s your dad?”

“We’re in the kitchen, Mommy!” Hailey called out. “Guess what? Daddy’s trying to cook!”

“Very bad, those smells,” Henry said solemnly. He and Natalie walked into the kitchen, where Hailey sat on one of the barstools at the center island with a black olive on the tip of each of her fingers on one hand. She wiggled her fingers at Natalie, who wiggled hers in return. Kyle stood by the stove, stirring something in a pot. An acrid scent filled the air, evidence of something recently burned.

“Hey,” Kyle said. “I thought instead of tacos, we’d make homemade pizza, but the cheese on the first one oozed all over the oven and burned.” He grimaced. “I cleaned it up, but it still stinks. Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” Natalie said tightly, not wanting to start an argument in front of the kids. “The taco stuff is already done. Let’s just have those.” She looked at their children. “Why don’t you two go wash your hands in the bathroom?”

“We can do it here,” Hailey said, jumping down from her seat.

“No,” Natalie said. “Mommy needs to talk to Daddy for a minute. In private.” The kids waited a moment, and then, seeing that their mother wasn’t smiling, left the kitchen and went down the hall to the bathroom.

“What’s wrong?” Kyle asked, letting go of the spoon he held and taking a couple of steps toward her.

She gave him a look that stopped him in his tracks. “I know about the background check. My mother told me, accidentally, assuming that you already had.”

“Nat, let me explain . . .”

“Not now,” she snapped. “Let’s just get through dinner and get the kids to bed.”

For the next two hours, Natalie spoke politely to her husband, pretending for her children’s sake that everything was normal. Once the kitchen had been cleaned up and the kids were bathed and tucked in, Natalie and Kyle returned downstairs, where they stood together in the kitchen, the corner of the house farthest from the kids’ rooms. Natalie didn’t want them to hear their parents fight.

“Before you say anything,” Kyle began, “I want you to know that I was going to tell you about running the report. I just wanted to get the results first.”

“And you thought that was a good idea,” Natalie said. Her jaw ached from gritting her teeth. “You seriously thought going behind my back was okay?”

“I didn’t think about it as going behind your back,” he said. “I just thought I’d do the check, and if anything weird came up, I would talk with you about it then.”

“It seems more likely that what you were really thinking was that if nothing ‘weird’ came up you wouldn’t have to tell me what you did.” She paused, watching as Kyle let her statement sink in. “Right?”

He stared at her, unblinking, for a good half minute before speaking. “Fine,” he said. “I decided to run the report and not say anything because I knew you’d be pissed. I did it to protect you.”

“You lied to me!” Natalie said, trying not to raise her voice, but failing. “After everything we talked about, how important you knew finding her was to me . . . after you promised not to judge her—”

“I wasn’t judging her!” Kyle said. His light brown eyes clouded with anger. “I was trying to keep you safe! I was looking out for our family. You were so blinded by your excitement—”

“Excuse me, blinded?” Natalie glared at him, her cheeks flushed, her fingernails digging into her palms.