Page 13 of Nightfire

Adopted. She was adopted. By parents who hadn’t wanted her. That had emerged clearly from her ‘mother’s’ diary.

“There was only the certificate of adoption, which was exclusively in my mother’s name. But as it turned out, the woman I thought was my mother was actually my aunt. I was my mother’s sister’s child. My, um, my biological mother had been a troubled girl, in and out of rehab, until she finally ran away from home in her late teens. It took me several days to piece this information together, mainly from a secret diary my mother—my aunt—had kept, and from newspaper articles about my real mother’s arrests. After my biological mother ran away, the trail went dead. So I hired a private detective. It took her almost six months to track down…" Chloe started trembling, looking at Harry and then Mike, then back to Harry.

Something was happening with Harry. He had barely spoken. His eyes were almost radioactively bright. The skin over his cheekbones was tight, deep furrows bracketed his mouth.

“Track down where I came from,” she ended in a whisper.

Emotion grabbed her throat. For a long moment, she couldn’t speak, could barely breathe. Could only stare at Harry.

No point mentioning the thousand false starts, disappointments, dead ends. Chloe’s birth mother had been erratic, mentally ill, with an unerring nose for violent, unstable men. Addicted to every substance going. The reports of the woman’s past made Chloe sick, but she kept digging. Because the truth was better than this…this nothing. This huge hole in the middle of her chest and of her life.

Her PI, Amanda Box, was a young, savvy woman. A former cop who’d quit because her boss had harassed her. She’d sued, won, moved on. And understood Chloe instinctively. Amanda had worked tirelessly for Chloe. It was very possible that without Amanda’s ferocious tenacity, Chloe wouldn’t be here, about to…

She gulped.

She watched Harry carefully, heart in throat.

The thing was, she didn’t know Harry, didn’t know anything about him. Had no idea how he would react.

This could end so badly.

She felt as if she were holding her heart out to Harry, literally. A small, pumping muscle, quivering with hope, in her outstretched hands. Dripping blood.

He could slap her down, break that heart, in an instant.

However much Chloe sternly told herself not to hope, she couldn’t help herself. It must have been all over her face. It was imprinted in every cell of her body. Wild, outrageous hope that this would end well. Hope of a kind and intensity she’d never felt before.

She hadn’t hoped this hard for anything, not even when the doctors had told her she might never walk again.

“Did you?” Harry asked, thick ash brown eyebrows drawn over the bridge of his nose. His voice sounded hoarse. “Did you track down where you came from?”

Chloe nodded, eyes never leaving his. Trying to read something in his light brown eyes and failing.

“Yes. Um.” Her throat was dry, palms wet. “As I said, it took my investigator six months. The investigator followed my biological mother mainly through her troubles with the law. My-my mother went west, to San Diego, got married to another drug addict who walked out on her when she was pregnant with me. I was the second child. The first was a b-boy. When I was five, m-my mother’s boyfriend killed her, wounded my brother, hurt me. Badly. That was the—the ‘accident.”

Chloe leaned forward, hands flat on the desk, so filled with nerves she could hardly sit still. Pressure was rising in her chest like steam. Slowly, so anxious she could barely feel her hands, she slid the envelope over to Harry Bolt. The room was utterly silent. The noise of the thick paper envelope crossing the desk sounded loud.

“It’s all in there. The PI’s report, the marriage certificate and the birth certificates of both me and my brother. The death certificates of my mother and her husband, my father. My mother’s husband’s name was Michael.” She swallowed heavily. “Michael Bolt. They ha-had two children.” Chloe was sweating, felt deep distress and this awful, singing hope. “Christine Bolt and…and Harry Bolt. I was born Christine Bolt.” She met the light brown eyes of the man she was now positive was her only living relative. Her throat tightened. It was almost painful speaking the words. “Harry…I think you’re my brother.”

Harry rose suddenly, face pale, jaw working. “Crissy?” he whispered, voice raw.

From somewhere deep inside her, a place she had no idea existed, lost but not forgotten, came the answer. “Hawwy?”

Chloe burst into tears.

FOUR

Holy. Shit.

Chloe was in Harry’s arms, crying so hard she was having trouble breathing. Harry was bent over her, holding her tightly, crying too. Mike had never seen Harry cry, ever. Not even when he’d come back from the war almost dead from terrible wounds and it had hurt him to breathe.

“I can’t believe this.” Harry pulled away and held Crissy—Chloe—by the shoulders, tears streaming down his face. “Oh my God. Is it you? Is it really you?” He didn’t wait for an answer, just pulled her into another bear hug.

But he didn’t need to ask. The resemblance was there, something almost tangible, which was why he’d been so frozen. Harry’s heart had been frantically sending him signals his head couldn’t accept.

They were brother and sister, all right. When you knew it, you couldn’t miss it. Male and female, yin and yang, but the same stock. It was amazing to Mike that they were clearly siblings and yet Chloe was so feminine and Harry was all male. But there it was—the same coloring, the same color eyes, even the cast of their faces was the same.

The Keillor kids had been like that. Three young brothers, clearly siblings, looking so much like their dad, but with a bit of their mom in there. A family, visibly bound by blood. His heart gave that familiar kick when he thought of them. He suppressed it, pushed it right back down again.