He looked at one of them.
Wait, a minute, I’m dreaming.
He looked again at the woman standing next to Natalie. That’s why Natalie’s face had seemed somewhat familiar when they’d first met that night. She looked like her mother.
Her mother.
The bitch.
He’d never forget her for the rest of his life.
He sat on the floor, his back to the cupboard, cradling the photo in his hands. Natalie was Emily’s birth mother.
Shit, why hadn’t he seen it? That’s why she was so nice to her. It wasn’t that she was just this stranger who’d taken a liking to her. And to him. Were all the looks and the lovemaking one big act? Has she played him for a fool?
Was she here to try and take Emily away from him?
He bit his lip. He hadn’t gone through an adoption agency. Was Natalie in Timber Creek to challenge the validity of it? Emily was his and no one, not even her own mother, was going to tell him otherwise.
****
Natalie knew Flynn well enough by now to sense when something was wrong. She could tell by the large strides he was taking that he wasn’t in the best of moods. The rap on her door, both quick and hard, also told her that maybe she’d done something wrong.
She opened it. He had some photos in his hand. The ones of her and her mother and father. She could clearly see them. She hadn’t even realized she’d lost them.
“I think we need to talk,” he said pushing by her to get into the room.
Something was wrong. But what was the connection to the photos? They didn’t reveal her secret. She sat down on the bed and threw the photos on the space beside her.
“The photo of you and the woman,” he said, pushing his hat back on his head.
“My mother.”
He took off his hat and slapped it on the side of his leg. “Are you Emily’s birth mother?”
The room began to spin. How had he deduced that from the photo? She could go on lying, staying here and in their lives, but Marie was right. They had a thing going on and she had to come clean or she’d lose him.
“Yes, yes I am.”
“She’s the baby that you lost?”
“I…”
“Is that why you came here to Timber Creek? You’re not looking for some fucking vacation house are you?”
Tears welled up in her eyes. He was angry and he had every right to be.
“Flynn, please hear me out. I was asked to come and look for Emily. That’s what I was doing near your property when my car went into the ditch. I had every intention of telling you who I was but then I saw her…I saw you, and I couldn’t.”
“But you still kept up this charade. All this time me believing that you were just a sweetheart and an angel sent from heaven for both me and my daughter. And yes, she’s my daughter,” he said waving his finger at her.
Natalie swallowed. “Please Flynn, come and sit down,” she said patting the spot beside her.
He paced up and down. “I think I’d be a lot happier standing.”
“Emily’s birth father died recently and his final request was for me to find her.”
“So up till then you’ve never thought of your little girl out there in the world?”
Natalie shook her head. She didn’t want him to think that way about her. Not now, not ever. “I’ve thought about her constantly, but I got on with my life to forget about the pain of having to give her up.”
He paced up and down some more and then stopped right in front of her. “You knew that she had Down’s?”
She shook her head as tears flooded down her face. “After the ultrasound they did tell me something wasn’t right but I assumed that my mother had made them tell me that because she wanted me to have an abortion.”
“Oh yeah, I can believe that. That lady is quite something.”
Natalie looked up at him. He’d never meet her mother so how…“what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Forget I said that.”
Natalie stood. “No, I can’t. It sounds like you know my mother very well and…”
Flynn raised both his eyebrows. She could tell by the look on Flynn’s face that he knew something she didn’t. That’s what Marie was referring to. “I think you’ve been hiding something from me too,” she said.
“Maybe, but I think you’ve trumped me. What were you hoping to achieve here, Natalie?”
“I don’t know. I thought I’d just meet Emily and leave but as soon as I saw her, I felt a connection to her. For god’s sake, Flynn, she’s my flesh and blood.”
“Yeah, that’s true, but I’m the one who raised her. I’m the one you’ve been playing. Sleeping with me, making me think I’d found the woman of my dreams when all the time you had an agenda.”