The Family They Chose (14 page)

He certainly couldn’t live a life marred by lies and deception.

He stood.

“Where are you going?” Her voice was panicked.

“I need to go out for a while. I need time to think, time to process things. I need to figure out how you could lie to me about something so important.”

She reached out to him.

“Jamison, please don’t go. We need to talk this out.”

He shook his head and let himself out the front door.

T
hey decided it would be best if Olivia moved back to Boston while Jamison finished the congressional session. Olivia didn’t like it, but he said he needed time to sort things out and she wanted to give him room.

She let him know that she loved him and would be waiting for him…forever, if that’s how long it took.

Back in Boston, as she put her things away, she realized that they were back to square one. No, this time it felt like square minus one, and she didn’t know if the damage could be fixed.

It was Derek’s fault.

She wasn’t blaming him for offering her the donor egg or for encouraging her to deceive her husband. She took full responsibility for that. She should’ve told Jamison.

That way, Derek wouldn’t have had anything to use against her. How could he have done it? How could he have gone straight to Jamison and spilled the beans without first giving her the chance to clean up her own mess and tell her husband herself?

First the blackmail innuendos, now this.

As far as she was concerned, her relationship with her brother was over.

But first she intended to give him a piece of her mind.

Olivia drove to the institute and went immediately to Derek’s office. She pushed open the closed door and found him talking on the phone.

“Get off the phone, Derek,” she said, like a woman possessed. Suddenly, she knew how Danny Kelso must feel when he threw back his head and wailed at the top of his lungs. That’s what she wanted to do now.

But since she still possessed a modicum of self-control, she refrained.

She did, however, raise her voice a few decibels when Derek ignored her and kept talking.

“I said get off the phone, Derek. I need to talk to you now!”

This time she got his attention. He ended the conversation.

“What the hell is wrong with you? Can’t you see I was on a business call?”

“Yes, I could see that. I just decided to come in here and start messing up your life like you’ve messed up mine. Oh, but there’s one problem—you don’t have a life. Is that why you derive such pleasure in messing with other people’s?”

He threw his hands up in the air. “Olivia. What are you talking about?”

She wanted to take her hand and swipe it across his desk, knock everything on it to the floor. She wanted to grab him by the shirtsleeves and shake him until his teeth rattled.

“You know what I’m talking about. You know what you told Jamison.”

Either he was a good actor or he truly was puzzled. “I talked to Jamison, but I didn’t really tell him anything. Except that I thought he needed to call off the dogs when it came to pressuring you into pumping out babies.”

“You told him about the donor egg.”

“No I did not.”

“But he knew.”

“Well, he didn’t hear it from me.”

Derek shrugged, to indicate case dismissed. Brother off the hook.

“There’s nobody else he could’ve heard it from, if not you. What I don’t understand is why you would set up your own sister for extortion, Derek. That’s about as low as it gets.”

His eyes shuttered.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

A different look from the adamant way he’d denied telling Jamison passed over his face. A completely different demeanor. Suddenly Olivia wanted to backpedal, because she was sure she’d missed something.

“You know what I’m talking about. The Valentine’s Day dinner party at my house when Jamison and I told the family I was pregnant. You followed me into the kitchen and said that we needed to
talk.
What did you want to talk about, Derek? A payment plan so that you’d keep my secret?”

It turned her stomach, but she could tell that’s what he’d been setting her up for. That he hadn’t contacted her…well, maybe he’d still felt a murmur of a heart or a conscience or a soul and he’d chickened out.

“I just don’t understand why you’d feel compelled to tell my husband what you did while I was lying in a hospital bed not even twenty-four hours after my miscarriage? What was in it for you? Could you just not stand to see somebody happy?”

He glanced down at his hands, fisted them, and then flexed them before he answered.

“I didn’t intend to blackmail you. What I wanted to talk to you about was the blood type of the donor. After the fact, I realized that your blood types didn’t match and that could’ve caused a snag in your seamless plan.”

Olivia studied her brother, trying to determine whether he was telling the truth or not. She wanted to believe him, but she couldn’t.

“Show me proof, Derek. Call up the file of this donor and show me what type of blood she has.”

He scratched his nose. “I can’t. I destroyed the original file.”

“You destroyed the file? You expect me to believe that?”

He blinked rapidly. “I couldn’t just transfer her eggs to you and leave the file empty. That’s called a paper trail. Someone could’ve followed it.”

She wasn’t buying it.

“You’d go to great pains to destroy a file to make the scheme, as you called it, seamless. Yet you’d forget all about the red flag of blood type. Doesn’t make sense. This is your business. It seems like blood types would be right up there in standard info right next to dark hair and dark eyes.”

His mouth flattened into a hard, straight line. “My
background is in business, Livie, not medicine. I had no idea what to look for beyond skin, hair and eye color. I was trying to make sure the baby looked like you. It didn’t occur to me to match the donor’s blood type with yours until was deleting the original file and saw it.”

He scratched his nose again. She’d read that was often a signal that someone was lying. But who knew for sure? Especially with Derek.

“I guess I’ll really never know the truth, will I?”

Derek shrugged.

“I many not have solid proof that it really was the blood I was concerned with, but I do have proof that I wasn’t the one who told your husband about the donor eggs. If you don’t believe me, just ask him.”

She left the institute more confused than when she arrived. Strange how her heart wanted to believe that he might be telling the truth, but her head still wasn’t buying his story.

She got home and the place seemed so empty. The Valentine’s Day dinner, the girl’s getaway with Helen and all those nights that she and Jamison had made love until the sun came up seemed like a distant memory.

She sat in her bedroom window seat, gazing out over the Gardens, which were just starting to show
the first signs of spring, and held the phone for a long time before she could bring herself to make the call.

When she finally did, she was surprised when he answered on the first ring.

“Hi, it’s me. I’m sorry. I’m
so
sorry. I never intended to lie to you. It just seemed like my last chance. Our last chance. And I so desperately wanted to give you a child. Can you ever forgive me?”

As much as Jamison disliked Derek, he had to give the guy credit. Derek might possibly have saved his and Olivia’s marriage.

Despite how rough around the edges and unpalatable the guy could be, he was right. Jamison and his family were partially to blame for Olivia’s desperation to have a child.

A desperation that drove her to go so far she’d do something that forced her to lie to him.

Maybe it was because she’d never lied before. Or maybe it was because Jamison felt partially responsible. It was definitely because he still loved her, despite what had happened and maybe even because of the lengths she’d gone to for him. But two days after they’d talked, he’d hopped on a Boston-bound plane and found himself wandering through the Public Garden at noon.

Pam had told him he’d find her there. Olivia had taken the Kelso boys on a picnic.

As he rounded a copse of trees that shaded a statue, there she sat on a red plaid picnic blanket with Danny in her lap. The boy held his truck, spinning the wheels, seeming perfectly content sitting there.

She was saying something to Kevin, who was running around the grass in front of the blanket throwing a football up in the air.

But her mouth froze mid-sentence when she saw Jamison. For a moment, he couldn’t speak, either. Seeing her sitting there with the boys was a picture.

They looked like a family. The small, dark-haired boys could’ve easily passed for her children. Not much of him and his Celtic coloring, but then again, anyone knew that dark hair and eyes were usually the dominant gene.

He stood there savoring the picture for a moment as everything important snapped into perfect focus. Suddenly the world seemed to make sense, or at least it seemed as if it could if the four of them became a family.

Then Olivia finally found her voice and said, “I’m so glad you’re here. I thought I’d lost you forever.”

He shook his head and lowered himself onto the blanket. “What kind of fool would I be if I let you walk out of my life? I’m not saying it was okay to
keep those things from me—there is nothing you can’t come to me with. But I love you and I’m glad you’re my wife.”

He leaned in and kissed her tenderly on the lips.

“Truck!”

When he looked up, Danny was offering him the toy truck and Kevin was asking him to toss the football.

As he was throwing the ball with the older boy, he glanced at the love of his life sitting on the blanket like the Madonna with her child. He knew exactly what she was thinking because he was thinking the same thing.

There had been snags in Danny’s adoption. He had to believe that had happened because the boys were meant to be their children. Part of their family.

The family they chose.