CHAPTER ONE #2
“You’re welcome.” Angela approached Ida and brushed a kiss on her soft wrinkled cheek, getting a whiff of the light lilac scent the older woman favored. “I’ll see you later.”
Leaving Ida, Angela carried her bags down the steps that led to the door into their suite. After she let herself in, Angela went to the small kitchen and unpacked the groceries.
She was switching over their laundry when she heard the door open, and slam shut.
“Angie!”
Poking her head out of the laundry room, she frowned at Kiara. “What? Why are you yelling?”
“I saw something today.” Kiara dropped her bag and coat on the floor by the door and hurried to Angela with a piece of paper in her hand.
“What did you see?” Angela asked as she shoved the damp laundry in her hands into the dryer.
“This.” Kiara held out the paper. “You have to look at this.”
Angela turned the dryer on before taking the paper. She looked down at it to see a picture printed on it. A large picture. Of… her?
“What is this?” Angela asked. “Are you practicing with graphics programs at the library?”
Kiara shook her head. “No. I printed this from the internet. It was slow at work today, so I was looking through my go-to celebrity gossip site. One of them had pictures from a gala that was held in California, and one of my favorite basketball players attended. She was his date.”
“What?” Angela looked at the paper again. “But… that looks like me.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Kiara came to stand next to her and looked down at the paper with her. “She could be your twin.”
“Only with nicer clothes, jewelry, and hair.”
“Yeah.” Kiara laughed, but it didn’t last long. “Seriously, though. She looks just like you.”
Angela peered more closely at the picture. The woman’s hair was up, but from what she could see, it was a similar shade of light brown to Angela’s. The woman looked to be the same height as her as well.
Was it possible?
She knew nothing about her birth family. Only what Jim and Sandra had told her, which had been that her birth parents hadn’t been good to her, and they’d taken her to give her a better life.
“Do you really think it’s possible that I have a twin sister, Kiki?”
“I don’t know,” Kiara said as they left the small laundry room and went into the suite. “But maybe she was given up for adoption too.”
“Why wouldn’t they have adopted both of us?”
“I don’t know,” Kiara admitted. “And I’m not sure I want to ask Jim.”
Angela didn’t want to ask him either. The last time she’d pressed for information on her birth family, it hadn’t gone well.
“What am I supposed to do with this information?” Angela asked as she sat down at the small round dining table that was just big enough for the two of them. “How am I supposed to find more information? Did the article give her name?”
“Nope.” Kiara got a glass of water, then sat down across from her. “But maybe we could phone the office of the team Cole Halverson plays for to see if we could get in contact with him.”
Angela wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like talking on the phone.”
“I know,” Kiara said. “So I’ll phone and pretend to be you. I doubt they’ll forward us on to him right away. They’ll probably just take a message and pass it to him.”
“I guess if that’s what you think we should do…” Angela wasn’t sure how she felt about this new bit of information.
She’d resigned herself to never finding out about her family, considering she’d thought her only source of information was Jim.
“Maybe you just have a double,” Kiara said. “But then again, maybe you have a sister. A twin.”
“Were there more pictures?” Angela asked.
Kiara pulled out her phone, and after a few swipes, she handed it to Angela. The picture on the screen was another one of the couple, only this time, they were looking at each other instead of facing forward.
The tall, handsome basketball player had his arm around the woman, and he was looking down at her with clear adoration. The woman had a shy smile on her face, but no less affection, as she gazed up at him.
They weren’t looking directly at the camera, so Angela didn’t know if the woman was even aware that her picture had been taken.
“They look like they’re in love,” she murmured, feeling a pang of longing. Whoever this woman was, she’d found someone who adored her.
“Yes,” Kiara agreed. “But there’s been no mention of Cole dating anyone recently.”
“You’ve kept up with his dating life?”
“Hey. You know I’m a fan of basketball and football. He’s one of the best, so of course, I follow news about him. Just like I follow news about my favorite quarterbacks.”
Kiara spent the next little while trying to find a contact number for Cole. As soon as she did, she placed the call.
Angela listened as Kiara asked the person on the other end of the line if she could pass a message to Cole Halverson. It seemed that the woman was agreeable because Kiara gave her Angela’s name and number.
“Do you think he’ll call me?” Angela asked.
Kiara shrugged as she set her phone down. She removed the scrunchy from her hair, shook her head, then gathered her curly brown hair back into a ponytail.
“If he doesn’t call back within a few days, I’ll call again. And then again.”
“I don’t want to bother him.”
“But don’t you want answers?”
Angela pressed a hand to her stomach. Did she want answers? If they were by some wild chance actually twins, it was clear the other woman moved in a completely different world than the one Angela lived in.
If Kiara was correct in the things she’d said, Cole Halverson was wealthy. Very wealthy. Which meant that this woman was used to moving in socially elite circles.
Angela certainly wasn’t.
She’d never even graduated from high school. It was only recently that she’d managed to get her GED. The same with Kiara. Neither of them even had a driver’s license.
Jim had only made the effort to get Craig his license, insisting that the girls hadn’t needed one. Even now that they’d gotten away from him, they still hadn’t been able to get their licenses.
The small town where they lived didn’t have a DMV, and they had no way of getting to the nearest one. So they had to make do with walking everywhere. Which wasn’t a problem, since the town wasn’t big. But it kept them trapped in the area, even though they’d managed to leave the homestead years ago.
It had taken far too long for them to work up the nerve to leave. Actually, it had taken her far too long. Kiara would have left as soon as she’d turned eighteen if it hadn’t been for Angela and, to a lesser degree, Sandra.
Instead, it had taken almost ten years—and Sandra’s death—before they’d left. Once they’d settled into life in Briar Hollow, Angela wished they’d done it sooner. Kiara’s response to that had always been that the important point was that they had done it. Better late than never.
Now Angela was looking at another possible change in her life. Would finding a sister mean she and Kiara could have a life beyond Briar Hollow?
She wasn’t sure what she wanted the answer to be.
As the days and weeks passed, without hearing any response to Kiara’s call, Angela tried to put it out of her mind. Kiara, however, wasn’t ready to give up so easily.
“This will be my last call,” Kiara said on New Year’s Eve, nearly six weeks after that first phone call. “If they don’t respond to this one, I’ll stop calling.”
“You said that before every other call you’ve made,” Angela reminded her.
She put the sandwich she’d prepared for Kiara on a plate and handed it to her, before making one for herself.
“I know.” Kiara set the plate down on the table, then sat in her chair. “But this time for sure.”
Angela joined her at the table. “Why this time for sure and not all the other times you’ve said it was the last time?”
“New year, new project,” Kiara replied with a shrug. “And if they have no interest in who you might be, their loss.”
Recalling the beautifully dressed woman on a handsome athlete’s arm, Angela wasn’t so sure they had lost anything by not getting in contact with her.
Over the past few weeks, she couldn’t help but wonder—if they really were siblings—why they’d been separated. Why whoever adopted the woman in the picture hadn’t wanted her too. Why Jim and Sandra hadn’t wanted Angela’s sister.
Though they had questions—well, Kiara had questions—Angela had felt a growing certainty that maybe it was best not to know about her past. Maybe God didn’t want her to know. She’d been praying about it and was willing to accept that perhaps that knowledge was not God’s will for her.
Sometimes she wished she remembered things about her life before the Reynolds the way Kiara and Craig did. But perhaps it was better that she remained clueless. Just forget about the past—both before her adoption and afterward—and focus on the future she and Kiara were striving for.
One far, far away from Briar Hollow and her adoptive father’s reach.