“Please…please don’t hurt me.”
“Sorry, but you have to pay, Mommy.”
The stranger stepped into the pool of light and she saw that he was an adult-sized, squinty-eyed, red-faced newborn with tufts of black hair.
“No! Please!”
There was a shrill ringing sound then, and her creepy tormentor abruptly evaporated.
A dream. It was only a dream, Lindsay realized, sitting up.
Yes, and it was morning. Sunlight streamed through the sheer curtains that covered her window, an eastern exposure high on the thirty-fourth floor.
She reached for her alarm clock before realizing that the ringing was coming from the telephone.
Her stomach roiled as she picked up the receiver. It wasn’t the middle of the night, but it wasn’t a reasonable hour yet, either.
Was she in for another eerie prank phone call? A couple of days had passed now since she’d had one, but it was taking her a long time to fall asleep every night. She kept tossing and turning, her body tensed, as if waiting for the inevitable call.
Now, as she pressed the Talk button and said a tentative hello, she braced herself all over again.
She could hear only heavy breathing on the other end of the line.
“Stop calling me,” she said tightly, clenching the phone.
“What?”
The voice was masculine. Not an unearthly falsetto.
“I’m sorry…who is this?” she asked quickly, glancing at the clock again as she stood up. It was just past seven. Who would call at this hour?
A client might…but none of them had her home number, thank God.
So who was on the line?
She lowered the receiver to check the Caller ID window.
“You don’t know me,” the voice was saying when she raised the phone to her ear again, “but my name is Leo Cellamino, and I live in Queens…”
Her gaze automatically shifted to the window. From it, she could see the East River and the sprawling rooftops of the outer borough beyond. The caller lived there, in Queens.
You don’t know me…
So who was he?
Oh.
Oh my God.
Somehow, she knew. Before he even said it, she knew.
It was partially because of the voice-the voice was vaguely familiar.
But it wasn’t just that.
Maybe it was some long-suppressed maternal instinct as well. Some connection that had been forged twenty years ago, and never fully detached.
In any case, she knew, before he said it, that she was talking to her son.
She sank down onto the edge of the bed again as his next words confirmed her suspicion.
“I think you might be my birth mother.”
Leo heard her gasp on the other end of the line.
He shouldn’t have called.
He should have just gone over there in person. He had her address.
But when he’d Googled it, he had seen that it was a fancy high-rise near Sutton Place. There was undoubtedly a doorman. It wasn’t as though Leo could walk right up to her door, knock, and introduce himself. And explaining the situation to a uniformed sentry in an effort to see her in person seemed much too awkward.
So he opted to call.
From a pay phone, because he didn’t want his mother to overhear him talking to her from home, and because his mother paid his cell phone bill and he didn’t want her questioning any unfamiliar Manhattan phone numbers.
And now here he was, with his biological mother on the line, trying to figure out what to say next.
She relieved him of that duty, sounding dazed as she asked, “How did you find me?”
“Someone e-mailed me the information. About you, and my father.”
“Your…father?”
“I know he died,” Leo assured her swiftly. “I saw the articles.”
“Articles?”
He hesitated, struck by a terrible thought. What if she didn’t know? About Jake Marcott? And the murder?
“From the Portland papers,” he said gently. “I got some links in that e-mail, and I read them all. You knew…right?”
“About the e-mail? No, I have no idea what you’re-”
“About Jake Marcott. You know…that he’s…”
“Dead. I knew. I was the one who found him,” she said, and he could hear the stark pain in her voice, could imagine it on her face.
A face that looked so like his own, even now.
He knew that because along with her contact information and the links to the newspaper archives, he had received another jpeg attachment. It was a digital photo, a little fuzzy and snapped from some distance. It showed a woman who was easily recognizable as the girl he’d seen in the other picture. She had the same dark hair, the same delicate beauty, the same slender build.
She was walking down a Manhattan street-he knew it was Manhattan because he could see the subway entrance disappearing into the sidewalk in the background, though he couldn’t make out the sign above it.
She wasn’t looking at the camera, which suggested she had no idea her photo was being taken…
Which gave him the creeps, really.
He was fascinated by the shot, though. He’d studied it for days, memorizing every detail, trying to work up the nerve to get in touch.
He finally had, and here she was, Lindsay Farrell-my mother?-on the other end of the line.
“I didn’t know you were the one who found Jake’s body,” he said, trying to remember the details from the articles. Jake’s body. It sounded so impersonal. And it was…except that the stranger in question, Jake, was his father.
“I just knew it had been a friend of his,” Leo rambled on, “but it didn’t say who.”
“The paper couldn’t print my name. I was underage then. Seventeen.”
“You were eighteen by the time you had me in August, though. Right?”
No response.
Not at first.
Then, so softly he had to strain to hear it, she said, “Right.”
Thud. His heart seemed to split in two and land in the soles of his feet.
So she really was his mother, and his father really was dead. As badly as he wanted to find his mother, to think that Lindsay Farrell was her, he hadn’t wanted to believe the other part. About Jake.
There went his fantasy of playing catch with a man who wouldn’t check his watch impatiently and say he had to go after the first couple of tosses.
There went his ideal father, someone with patience and attention and a heart full of love for his son.
There went another dad, gone, poof! Just like that. Just like Anthony Cellamino.
It wasn’t fair.
“Leo…did you say that was your name?”
It wasn’t fair, but she was still there. Lindsay. Sounding tentative. Vulnerable.
As tentative and vulnerable as Leo himself was feeling.
“Yes,” he replied somewhat hoarsely, “that’s my name.”
“Are you happy?”
That was a strange question. He didn’t know how to answer it.
“Happy?” he echoed stupidly. “What do you mean?”
“Just…are you happy?”
“You mean right now?”
“I mean in general. Your life. Has it been happy?”
He thought back to the time before his father left. And even about some times after he was gone.
“Mostly,” he admitted. “It’s been mostly happy. But there’s been sad stuff, too.”
“Everyone’s life is like that. But it wasn’t bad, right? Nobody beat you up, or starved you, or anything like that, right?”
“Right.”
She sighed. “I just want to know that I did the right thing. I want to know that you were raised by someone who loved you with all their heart.”
“My mother did. Does,” he amended, before he remembered that Betty Cellamino wasn’t really his mother.
No, but she loved him with all her heart. That wasn’t in dispute here, and never would be.
“What about your father?”
Leo’s thoughts darkened at the question. “He’s gone.”
“Gone? You mean he died?”
“No.” Worse. “He left.”
Silence.