“I miss him so much. It’s funny, I didn’t know him very well till the end of his life. Us livin’ in the same town and all, we shoulda been better friends. But those last weeks with him are some of my most treasured memories.”
“I assure you, he reciprocated those feelings. And to answer your question, I miss him every single day.” He held out a hand to her and Em took it, giving it a squeeze.
“So what brings you to this neck of the woods, Sanjeev? You bringin’ Dixie lunch?”
He shook his head. “This came for you today.” He held out two manila envelopes with her name scrawled across them and the company’s address beneath.
She shrugged. “Must’ve gotten mixed up in the big house mail. Thanks, Sanjeev.” She dropped it on her desk and motioned to the chair for Sanjeev to sit.
“Oh, I mustn’t. There’s work to be done at the big house. Are we still on for our Dora the Explorer, Mona and Lisa playdate later this week? I promised those heathens of Dixie’s a meal fit for a queen.”
Em grinned. Dora loved Sanjeev and she loved playing with Dixie’s dogs Mona and Lisa in that enormous football field they called a backyard. “Absolutely. But promise me, no filet for Dora. She’s got a touchy tummy and the vet says we have to watch her weight.”
Sanjeev bowed again. “I promise, no filet. I cannot promise there won’t be gravy. Surely you can’t expect me to allow Mona and Lisa to dine on steak as Dora looks on with only her pitiful dry kibble? It’s unkind.”
Em laughed. “Fine. Gravy it is. Just a little.” For the umpteenth time in as many days, Em found herself counting her blessings. This motley crew of friends might not be what Plum Orchard or her mother titled respectable, but she didn’t care.
She was loved. Her boys were loved. Even Dora was loved. Nothing else mattered. Clifton could, in the immortal words of Landon, “suck it.”
These people gave more to her children than their own father did. She would not allow Clifton to sully it with his sudden bid for morality.
“Then I bid you good afternoon, and, Emmaline?”
“Uh-huh?”
“About your womanhood?”
Her cheeks went bright red.
Sanjeev’s eyes twinkled. “You go, girl!” He glided out of the door as softly as he’d entered, making her smile again.
With a sigh, she turned her attention to the flowery scrawl on the first envelope and slit it open. Probably more hate mail. Usually, it was easy to identify which member in town had sent it.
Jared Tompkins had a penchant for forgetting to cross his T’s just like in high school, and Charla Sue Lawson’s letters smelled like Chanel No. 5.
But this one didn’t smell like perfume, and the T’s were definitely crossed. Em’s eyes flew over the official piece of paper with the raised seal.
It was a birth certificate.
Hers.
Her heart began to crash in her ears while the rest of the world crumbled around her. This was a lie. It had to be a lie. Who would do something so awful?
Her fingers shook, her stomach sloshed with the weight of her lunch. She took several deep breaths and forced herself to read again the line designated for Name of Father.
Well, that was wrong. Of course it was wrong. Someone was playing a cruel joke on her.
Her father was Edward Mitchell. He’d left when she was just an infant then died three years later of lung cancer. He’d been an outsider from Texas. Not from Plum Orchard, and according to her mother, he’d never been happy living here.
He was an accountant. He liked numbers. He’d run off to Texas when he’d left Clora. She remembered very clearly the open-and-shut discussion she’d had with Clora about him. She had one picture of him—a picture of him with her mother on their wedding day. Neither of them looked wildly in love, but then, Clora wasn’t wild about anything.
It was the only picture Em had, old and faded; she’d clung to it when her mother had banished all talk of him.
But he was absolutely not Ethan Davis, husband to Pearl, father to her best friend in the whole world—Dixie Davis.
*
The phone rang and rang, just like it always did when he called the number on his phone that was supposed to be Reece’s. This time, he wasn’t hanging up. This time he was going to leave her a message and find out what the hell she wanted because he had other things he wanted to do, and Reece was standing in the way of it all.
He knew she was here—somewhere. He knew he’d seen her at the school and he knew she was trying to get a glimpse of Maizy.
What scared the shit out of him was why. Why did she want to see her after all this time? Was she hatching some crazy plan to snatch her? Was Reece really selfless enough to care that much about another human being?
His lips thinned when he got her voice mail. “Reece? It’s Jax. Let’s stop the bullshit. Meet me down by the bridge off Lambert tomorrow. Five o’clock. If you don’t show up, I’m calling the cops.”
Clicking the phone off, he dropped it on the kitchen table like it was hot.
Time to face your demons, Jackson Hawthorne.