Chapter 56
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Fiona
Jasper had been carrying the same cup of coffee around for so long I knew it had gone cold.
He had taken it onto the porch, brought it back inside, set it on the counter while he checked the back door, then picked it up again before finally sitting across from me at the little kitchen table.
He still hadn’t taken more than one sip.
That bothered me more than I wanted to admit. Jasper could drink coffee through an argument, a crisis, or someone threatening to shoot him. Watching him use the mug as something to do with his hands told me exactly how much he didn’t want to have this conversation.
I had waited through breakfast without pushing. Then I waited while he checked the boat and walked around the cabin as if someone might have somehow appeared in the middle of the bayou overnight. By the time he came back inside, I was done giving him room.
I twisted Granny’s wedding ring around my finger, feeling the worn metal move against my skin while I watched him stare into coffee he wasn’t drinking. The ring helped. It reminded me that there were things in my life I knew with absolute certainty.
Granny was my grandmother. Frank and Georgie were my brothers. Charlie was safe in Rosewood with his parents. Jasper was my husband. Whatever he had learned couldn’t reach backward and take those things from me.
“You promised to tell me everything once we were safe,” I finally said.
Jasper lifted his gaze, and there was no joke waiting in his expression, not even a hint of the smile he usually used when he knew I was nervous. I hated that immediately.
“We’re about as safe as we’re going to get unless you plan on digging a hole under this cabin, so tell me.”
“I know, Ma Belle.” Jasper set the mug down and rubbed one hand over his jaw. He looked tired, though I knew we had both slept. “I’m not tryin’ to keep it from you. I’m tryin’ to figure out where the fuck to start.”
“Start with the part you knew before we got married.” My voice came out sharper than I intended, but I didn’t take it back. “Then keep going until I know everything you know.”
Jasper nodded once.
Instead of reaching for my hand, he turned his palm up on the table between us and waited.
That tiny hesitation unsettled me almost as much as his silence had.
Touching me was normally instinctive for him.
He caught my fingers while we walked, rested his hand against my back when he passed behind me, pulled me close without seeming to realize he had done it.
Now he was giving me the choice before the conversation even began. I placed my hand in his, and his fingers closed around mine carefully.
“There’s a woman named Carly,” he said. “She’s Fury’s old lady; he’s a member of the Soulless Sinners.
Carly’s been goin’ through Society records that were left behind by a woman named Sienna.
She’s good at findin’ people buried in old files, better than just about anybody I know.
King trusts her work because she doesn’t call him with guesses. ”
I frowned because the explanation felt like a long road to something I didn’t understand.
“And this Carly found something?”
“Yeah.” Jasper’s thumb stopped moving over my knuckles. “She found a Society file on a baby girl named Kaitlyn Grace Ward.”
The name meant nothing. I searched my memory anyway, wondering if Jasper had mentioned a Kaitlyn somewhere in the endless collection of bikers, wives, girlfriends, children, presidents, enforcers, and cousins I had been introduced to over the last year.
Nothing surfaced. When I looked back at Jasper, he was watching me so closely that something cold slid beneath my ribs.
“Who is Kaitlyn Grace Ward?” I asked.
“You are.”
For a second, I honestly thought I had heard the sentence wrong. I waited for Jasper to explain, but he didn’t. He simply held my hand and let me stare at him.
“No,” I said eventually, because that was the only response my brain could produce. “My name is Fiona.”
“I know.”
I pulled my hand free and sat back, needing the small amount of distance between us. “I have always been Fiona.”
Jasper’s face tightened. “Kaitlyn Grace Ward was the name your biological mother gave you when you were born. The people you knew as your mom and dad adopted you when you were a newborn.”
The word biological barely registered.
Adopted did.
I stood so quickly my chair scraped hard against the floor. Jasper started to rise, but I shook my head, and he stayed where he was. My chest felt too tight for the small room, so I crossed to the screened window and stared out at water I couldn’t really see.
“Granny adopted me,” I said. “My parents didn’t adopt me.”
“They did, Fi.”
“My mother was my mother.” I turned on him, suddenly furious with the entire conversation even though I knew Jasper hadn’t created any of it. “My dad was my dad. They didn’t become less mine because somebody found some file eighteen years later.”
“They didn’t.” Jasper’s answer came immediately. “I’m not tellin’ you they weren’t your parents. They raised you. They loved you. They were your mom and dad.”
A memory surfaced before I could stop it.
My mother sitting beside my bed while I was sick, her fingers moving slowly through my hair as she sang.
I couldn’t remember the song anymore, and that loss bothered me sometimes more than the big memories I knew were gone.
I could still remember how her palm felt against my forehead, though, cool and gentle, and how completely safe I had been because she was there.
That woman was my mother.
Nothing Jasper said could change that.
“She sang to me when I was sick,” I whispered.
Jasper’s expression softened. “Then that’s your mom singin’ to you. Adoption doesn’t take that away.”
Charlie entered my thoughts so quickly it felt like Jasper had put him there.
I had given birth to Charlie, but Claudia was his mother.
Frank was his father. I had never thought of Claudia as less real because she hadn’t carried him.
She was the one who was building his childhood around him, and I had chosen her because I believed she could do exactly that.
My mother had done the same for me. The realization didn’t make learning I was adopted less shocking, but it stopped the fear that something had just stolen her from me.
I returned to the table and sat slowly. Jasper didn’t offer his hand this time. I reached for it myself. “How did they get me?”
“That’s what Carly was able to trace.” Jasper laced his fingers through mine and waited until I met his eyes.
“A man called Knuckles contacted the Society when you were born. He wanted the baby in his care placed somewhere she would disappear from the life she’d been born into.
The Society contact who took that request was a man named Isaac.
Isaac had a brother and sister-in-law who couldn’t have children.
Instead of puttin’ you through whatever process the Society normally used, he arranged for his brother and his wife to take you. ”
The words moved slowly through me until one finally caught. “His brother and his wife were my parents?”
“Yeah.”
I looked away because tears came without warning. It wasn’t the adoption that did it. It was knowing they couldn’t have children. Knowing that before I ever became Fiona, there had been two people who wanted a baby and believed they might never have one. Then someone placed me in their lives.
“They wanted me,” I said, and my voice broke on the last word.
Jasper squeezed my hand. “Yeah, baby. They wanted you.”
Questions flooded in so quickly I couldn’t separate them.
Had my mother held me first?
Had Dad?
Which one of them chose Fiona?
Had they known I already had a name?
Had they planned to tell me someday?
I had spent years wishing for one more conversation with my parents.
Suddenly I had a dozen new questions to add to all the others they would never answer.
Jasper couldn’t give me those pieces, and I didn’t ask him to invent them.
He told me what Carly knew instead. Isaac arranged the placement and the legal identity.
I became Fiona Mitchell and was raised by my parents until they died in the car accident.
After that, I entered foster care, and the trail that had connected me to my birth disappeared.
“So foster care lost me,” I murmured, wiping beneath my eyes with my free hand.
“Pretty fuckin’ effectively.”
A strange laugh escaped me. “I spent years thinking the system couldn’t keep track of anything.”
“Apparently that was finally useful.”
That little piece of normal Jasper gave me enough space to breathe again.
He continued more carefully, explaining that Carly had traced me through the foster system until she reached Rosewood.
By the time she reached Martha Steiner, Carly knew Fiona Mitchell-Steiner and Kaitlyn Grace Ward were the same person.
I hated the thought of a stranger reading my life in records.
On paper, those years probably looked neat.
Foster placement. Pregnancy. Homelessness.
Birth. Adoption. None of it showed me watching Claudia find Charlie, holding my breath until I knew he was safe.
It didn’t show Frank becoming his father or Granny looking at me like she had already decided I belonged to her before I understood what she was offering.
Facts could tell Carly where I had been. They couldn’t tell her who I was.
“Who named me Kaitlyn Grace?” I asked.
Jasper went still for a moment before answering. “Your biological mother. Her name was Kaylah Russell.”
I repeated the name silently. Kaylah. Nothing moved inside me. No memory. No inexplicable recognition. She was a stranger who had suddenly been placed at the beginning of my life.
“Where is she?”
“I’m sorry, Cher. She died years ago.”