Somewhere Out There(99)

The only sounds in the room were the steady beeps coming from the monitors to which Brooke was attached. She wished she knew exactly what to say, how to express the crazy mix of emotions rushing through her. Foremost she was relieved, but she also felt wary, unsure of how to navigate a conversation about finding the background check in her sister’s kitchen that day. But having met Natalie, having spent just a few precious weeks with her, Brooke knew she needed to find a way to work things out—she couldn’t deprive her daughter of the same thing Brooke had been denied. She couldn’t allow a single argument to ruin the one chance at having a family she’d ever had.

“Thanks for coming,” Brooke finally said, in a soft voice. She looked at her sister, searching her face for some clue to whether Natalie was here out of a sense of duty or because she truly wanted to come.

“I thought you’d be pissed,” Natalie said, and the tension in her face visibly relaxed.

“But you came anyway.” Brooke paused, and gave her sister a wry smile. “We’re both stubborn. So there’s that.”

Natalie’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry, Brooke. I can’t apologize enough for hurting you. I never meant—”

“It’s okay,” Brooke said, holding up her hand to stop Natalie from saying more. “I get it. Kyle ran the report without telling you, and I understand why he did. If I was him, I probably would have done the same thing. Let’s just leave it at that.”

Natalie eyed her for a moment, looking as though she were trying to decipher whether or not to take Brooke at her word. “Okay,” she said.

And then Brooke asked the question that had been in the back of her mind since the last day they’d seen each other. The day she’d given Natalie the box filled with the details of their birth mother’s life. “Have you seen her yet?”

The look on Natalie’s face told Brooke her sister knew to whom she referred, and Natalie shook her head.

Brooke’s eyebrows both rose. “Why not?”

“I’m not sure. I guess I’m afraid.”

“That she’ll reject you?” Brooke asked. Her voice was barely above a whisper. This was another reason why Brooke had stayed in her car when she drove to her mother’s clinic—she could never work up the courage to face the possibility that the mother who had let her go over three decades ago would simply turn her away.

“Yeah. I think that’s probably it.”

“Me, too,” Brooke admitted. And then she spoke again, before she could change her mind. “Maybe it would be easier if we saw her together.”

Natalie looked at her. “Really? Are you sure?”

“No,” Brooke said, wondering if she would regret what she’d just offered to do. “But it has to be better than either one of us going alone.”





Jennifer


I raced down the hall from my office to the front of the building, where I’d been summoned the moment a woman entered the reception area, cradling her bleeding dog in her arms.

“Where are they?” I asked Chandi, who sat at her desk by the door, typing something into her computer. Like me, she was in her midfifties, and at this point, we’d worked together for more than thirty years. She was my business manager, my accountant, and, besides Evan, my closest friend. When Randy had retired and sold me his practice, one of the first things I did was make sure Chandi knew I couldn’t run the clinic without her.

“Room three,” she said, nodding in that direction. “Paula is with them.” Paula was one of the inmates I’d worked with for the past six years, a woman convicted of check-writing fraud. As I had, she earned her vet tech degree while still incarcerated, and when she was released, I gave her a full-time job. She was a short, heavyset woman with a big smile and sparkling green eyes; since joining my team, she’d met and married her husband, and given birth to a little boy named Joseph. Not all of the women from the prison took to the service-dog training program—some quit, some ended up committing other crimes and returning to jail—but Paula was one of my success stories.

“Dr. Richmond,” Paula said as I entered the exam room. She wore light blue scrubs, and her auburn hair was pulled into a ponytail on top of her head. The dog lay on the paper-lined table, its white fur bloody along its side, its breathing pattern staggered and irregular. I looked at the owner, a woman I recognized as someone new to the clinic—I’d seen her and her dog only a handful of times, so I had a hard time recalling her name. “This is Gretchen,” Paula continued. “And her pup, Wiley.”

I stepped over to the table and rested a gentle hand on the dog’s head. “It’s okay, boy,” I said in a soothing voice. He had a deep, six-inch laceration along his rib cage that I immediately knew would require stitches. But first, we’d need to get him into X-ray to make sure he didn’t have any broken bones, and then perform an ultrasound to find any possible internal bleeding. I raised my eyes to Gretchen, a thin blond woman who was trying not to cry. She appeared to be in her mid-to late thirties. The same age as my girls. I blinked a few times, attempting to push down this thought. Even now, more than three decades after I’d last seen them, they were always lurking in the dark corners of my mind, ready to take me back to the moment in which I lost them. I still wrote each of my daughters a letter on her birthday, filing them away in the same box where I kept the notebooks I’d written in while in prison. I told them about my marriage to Evan, my growing vet practice, and the volunteer work I did with other incarcerated women. I told them that after I’d reached out to my mother several times over the years, her husband finally called me and said that she’d had a sudden heart attack when she was fifty-seven and died. I told them how deeply I grieved the fact that she and I never were able to resolve our differences, and that I hoped their relationships with their new families were healthy and strong. I told them that I thought about them every single day.