There was more. Several pictures had a young girl in them, aged about two or three years old. Honey blonde but with the same dark brown eyes as her mother, she looked to be a happy child and always had a coloring pencil in one hand and paper in the other—either that or she was dressing a doll in all manner of garments.
Tamsyn turned another page and felt a wave of shock hit her fair smack in the stomach. She blinked away the black dots that began to swim before her eyes, closing them briefly—unable to believe what she saw before her. She took a steadying breath, then another, before opening her eyes again.
The picture swam before her and she blinked once more to clear her vision. Yes, it was still the same as before. The shock of it was fading, but the image’s ramifications were no less devastating. There, right in front of her, stood the woman Tamsyn believed to be her mother, with the man and an older version of the little girl…and with a young boy aged about twelve. A young boy with brown hair and gray eyes.
A young boy who looked very much like Finn Gallagher.
Sixteen
Finn Gallagher knew her mother!
He’d lied to her all this time. Confusion warred with anger inside her until, with a bubbling rising fury, anger won. How dare he? He’d known she was looking for her mother and yet he’d never given the slightest indication he knew her mother at all. In fact, he’d deliberately and calculatedly told her Ellen didn’t live there. Well, didn’t live up on the hill at his house, maybe, but that was splitting hairs.
Tamsyn slammed the album shut and staggered to her feet, unsure of what to do next. The sound of a car coming up the driveway gave her her answer. It could only be one person.
She turned to the door and easily unlocked the deadlock from inside—it was, after all, designed to keep people out of the room, not in it. She left the door ajar as she strode down the hallway toward the front door. Finn stood there in all his God-given glory, fresh and handsome in a pale gray suit, white shirt and tie.
“I heard about the storm, are you all right? You look—”
She jabbed him in the chest with her forefinger, taking him completely by surprise. “You knew!” she shouted, unable to contain her anger a second longer. “You knew all along and you lied to me! Why?”
For a second he almost looked as if he was about to deny her accusation, but then a cold, calm expression settled over his face, his eyes turning arctic.
“I never lied to you.”
“You did,” she insisted, fighting back the burning sensation that began to sting her eyes. Be damned if she was going to cry in front of him. He didn’t deserve her tears after the way he’d taken her trust, her fragile heart and stomped them under his feet as if she was nothing. “You deliberately withheld the truth from me when you could have told me from day one where I could find my mother. Worse, you let me trust you.”
“Look, I told you that Ellen didn’t live at my house. That’s the truth.”
“But you never thought to tell me that she lived here.” Tamsyn uttered a bitter laugh. “Oh, I bet you had a good old chuckle about that when I took on the lease. What a freaking joke. Tamsyn Masters living in her mother’s house and not even knowing it. I suppose the whole town has been having a roaring time at my expense. Tell me, does everyone know?”
His silence told her everything.