Chapter 3 #3
She smiled faintly at the memory. Luigi Zampilli, a short fireplug of a man with the hands of a neurosurgeon. Ten thousand dollars and the safe was open in five minutes.
The two men were staring at her. It was getting harder and harder to speak. She finished her tea to moisten her throat, wishing she could fast forward to a quarter of an hour from now when she’d told it all and knew what the reaction was.
“Inside—inside the safe were several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Treasury bonds, ten pounds of gold ingots, the title to a number of properties I had no idea they owned…and a black box full of documents.”
With a shaking hand, Chloe placed the manila envelope on Harry Bolt’s desk and stared at it. Her life in an envelope. She lifted her eyes to his, so like her own.
“I was adopted,” she said finally, swallowing heavily.
“I had no idea, none. When I saw the adoption certificate, I felt like someone had hit me on the side of the head. I was frightened and relieved at the same time, because those two people were not my biological mother and father. I think at that moment I realized I wasn’t a monster because I couldn’t love my parents.
Simply couldn’t, much as I wanted to, because there was nothing there to love. ”
She’d been so shocked she’d simply sat in an armchair throughout a long day and night, sifting through her memories, letting them fall like the elements of a kaleidoscope into a new pattern, one that made more sense to her, where the old one had made no sense to her at all.
Adopted. She was adopted. By parents who hadn’t wanted her. That had emerged clearly from her ‘mother’s’ diary.
“There was only the certificate of adoption, which was exclusively in my mother’s name.
But as it turned out, the woman I thought was my mother was actually my aunt.
I was my mother’s sister’s child. My, um, my biological mother had been a troubled girl, in and out of rehab, until she finally ran away from home in her late teens.
It took me several days to piece this information together, mainly from a secret diary my mother—my aunt—had kept, and from newspaper articles about my real mother’s arrests.
After my biological mother ran away, the trail went dead.
So I hired a private detective. It took her almost six months to track down…
" Chloe started trembling, looking at Harry and then Mike, then back to Harry.
Something was happening with Harry. He had barely spoken. His eyes were almost radioactively bright. The skin over his cheekbones was tight, deep furrows bracketed his mouth.
“Track down where I came from,” she ended in a whisper.
Emotion grabbed her throat. For a long moment, she couldn’t speak, could barely breathe. Could only stare at Harry.
No point mentioning the thousand false starts, disappointments, dead ends.
Chloe’s birth mother had been erratic, mentally ill, with an unerring nose for violent, unstable men.
Addicted to every substance going. The reports of the woman’s past made Chloe sick, but she kept digging.
Because the truth was better than this…this nothing.
This huge hole in the middle of her chest and of her life.
Her PI, Amanda Box, was a young, savvy woman.
A former cop who’d quit because her boss had harassed her.
She’d sued, won, moved on. And understood Chloe instinctively.
Amanda had worked tirelessly for Chloe. It was very possible that without Amanda’s ferocious tenacity, Chloe wouldn’t be here, about to…
She gulped.
She watched Harry carefully, heart in throat.
The thing was, she didn’t know Harry, didn’t know anything about him. Had no idea how he would react.
This could end so badly.
She felt as if she were holding her heart out to Harry, literally. A small, pumping muscle, quivering with hope, in her outstretched hands. Dripping blood.
He could slap her down, break that heart, in an instant.
However much Chloe sternly told herself not to hope, she couldn’t help herself. It must have been all over her face. It was imprinted in every cell of her body. Wild, outrageous hope that this would end well. Hope of a kind and intensity she’d never felt before.
She hadn’t hoped this hard for anything, not even when the doctors had told her she might never walk again.
“Did you?” Harry asked, thick ash brown eyebrows drawn over the bridge of his nose. His voice sounded hoarse. “Did you track down where you came from?”
Chloe nodded, eyes never leaving his. Trying to read something in his light brown eyes and failing.
“Yes. Um.” Her throat was dry, palms wet.
“As I said, it took my investigator six months. The investigator followed my biological mother mainly through her troubles with the law. My-my mother went west, to San Diego, got married to another drug addict who walked out on her when she was pregnant with me. I was the second child. The first was a b-boy. When I was five, m-my mother’s boyfriend killed her, wounded my brother, hurt me. Badly. That was the—the ‘accident.”
Chloe leaned forward, hands flat on the desk, so filled with nerves she could hardly sit still.
Pressure was rising in her chest like steam.
Slowly, so anxious she could barely feel her hands, she slid the envelope over to Harry Bolt.
The room was utterly silent. The noise of the thick paper envelope crossing the desk sounded loud.
“It’s all in there. The PI’s report, the marriage certificate and the birth certificates of both me and my brother.
The death certificates of my mother and her husband, my father.
My mother’s husband’s name was Michael.” She swallowed heavily.
“Michael Bolt. They ha-had two children.” Chloe was sweating, felt deep distress and this awful, singing hope.
“Christine Bolt and…and Harry Bolt. I was born Christine Bolt.” She met the light brown eyes of the man she was now positive was her only living relative.
Her throat tightened. It was almost painful speaking the words. “Harry…I think you’re my brother.”
Harry rose suddenly, face pale, jaw working. “Crissy?” he whispered, voice raw.
From somewhere deep inside her, a place she had no idea existed, lost but not forgotten, came the answer. “Hawwy?”
Chloe burst into tears.