“What is he doing here?”
“Delilah?” His voice drags my attention from my mother to him. “Follow me.” He turns and walks outside to the big black SUV without another word. My mother places her arm around my neck, my dad standing behind us with an unreadable look on his face.
“What is going on?” I whisper to either of them, but neither of them says anything.
Turning my attention back to Mark, he opens the back door to the Escalade and two little purple shoes slip down onto the concrete.
My eyes widen as a little girl steps around the door. Her dark curly hair frames her face and her blue eyes slowly slip to mine and I lose my breath, tears filling my eyes.
She hugs a tattered stuffed frog to her chest, the look of fear making her bottom lip tremble as she looks around like she’s lost. My heart sinks and instinct kicks in to want to comfort her. My arms instantly reach out to hold her and tell her it’s okay but I quickly pull them to my chest. My heart and mind battling. What the hell is going on here? I don’t know what to say or do. Nothing, absolutely nothing has prepared me for this moment. But… I’ve always wondered if the day would come. I dreamed about it and cried about it.
Every little kid I’ve passed in the last four years, I’ve looked straight in the face for ocean-colored eyes, and that heart-shaped face.
I looked for my daughter; my baby.
But here she is and she’s scared and alone and I don’t know what to say or do.
Suddenly I hear my own breathing, my eyes slowly blinking as I stare at the girl. My whole world spinning and emotions slamming into me so hard that I fall to my knees and see nothing but black.
“Delilah, wake up, sweetheart.” The sound of my mother’s voice brings me from a dark place and I shoot up and look around.
I’m in my room, Lee sitting at the end of the bed with a worried look on his face, and my dad stands at the doorway.
My eyes fall back to my mom’s and tears fill my eyes.
“Is it real, is she here?”
My mother nods. “Yes, it’s her.”
“Why? What happened? Does she know who I am?” So many questions fill my head and I just say them out loud without another thought.
“Calm down.” My mother pats my thigh, and I take in a deep breath, trying to stabilize myself. “So, her parents, Franklin and Maranda, have passed away from what Mark told us. The mother had cancer, but they were both found dead in their beds yesterday. They’re doing an autopsy and investigation, but right now it looks to be like the mother died from natural causes and the father overdosed.”
I blink at the information, none of it making sense. Why would Franklin do that when he had a kid? They wanted a little girl so badly, that’s why I chose them. But it explains why my little girl is here now.
“When we set up the closed adoption, we made it to where she had to be brought to us before being placed in someone else’s care. Do you remember?”
Pulling my knees to my chest, I lean my head against them, tears slipping down my face to the point my cheeks feel chapped. I remember, but I never thought this would happen. That both parents would die and she would be brought back to me. I was a kid when I got pregnant and scared out of my mind. We couldn’t find Thane, and I was alone. All I could think about was not having a daddy for my baby and being a teenage mom without a clue in the world at raising a baby. I told my parents I wanted to set the baby up for adoption and they were pissed. I was still in high school, selfish, and so fucking scared that I just cried and cried myself to sleep for months on end. That’s when my parents finally came around to the idea of adoption and started to help me figure things out. About seven months along, they sent me to “camp” for the summer, that’s what we told everyone anyway, really I was just in Arizona. That’s where I delivered and set up the private adoption too. Franklin and Maranda couldn’t get pregnant because Maranda lost a baby late in pregnancy and had to have surgery to remove everything. They were rich from an inheritance, they had great jobs and big ass house with lots of land. It was everything I couldn’t give my kid. I thought I was making the right decision, it all felt so right. Until after hours of labor, they let me hold her for a few minutes. Her blue eyes, and God, how small she was. I fell in love instantly and then she was given to her new mom and dad. I wanted to back out but Franklin and Maranda’s story, the way they looked at her, at my child, as if she were their own. I couldn’t.