The Secret Father

She groped inside her briefcase for the framed picture she’d packed that morning. Zach shifted his hand to his holstered pistol. It wasn’t in the least funny, but Olivia wanted to smile. He didn’t trust easily either.

“I’m sorry to do it this way.” She hadn’t come here to be unkind. “But I don’t think you’ll believe me without proof.” She held the photo against her chest. “I met you in Chicago. You were taking some kind of a class. I believed we cared for each other.” She broke off. “I’m rambling because I’m nervous, but here’s what happened. You left for a training mission—it was supposed to last two weeks—but I didn’t hear from you for over a month, and then I saw a wire release that said you were dead.”

He stared. For a moment, time tunneled. She was trying to reach him, but he’d left her behind. “Zach, look at this photo.” She turned it, showing him his son’s face.

At first his eyes widened. His nostrils flared with each deep breath. When he opened his mouth, a sigh eased between his lips. “No.” Anguish added a syllable to the word.

Olivia held as still as she could, considering she was trembling. His “no” didn’t mean he’d denied Evan was his child. He could have trouble believing he’d forgotten his son.

“I would have told you I was pregnant, but you left before I knew.”

Without looking at her, Zach came back, his leather belt creaking in the thick silence. Sweat beaded on his forehead. He curled his fingers around the photo’s frame and her hand. Unable to bear the heat of his touch, she let the picture go.

“I’ve seen his face all over my mother’s house.”

She didn’t understand. “What?”

“In photos of me.” He looked up, his gaze soft, yet wounded. “He’s six?”

“Five.” What the hell was going on? “What happened to you?”

“I honestly don’t remember Chicago. I trained there for a mission in a place not many people know about. I was on a team no one talks about.” He met her gaze—no, he held hers with his intensity. “I was supposed to fly in and pick up an officer who was stuck in a place she shouldn’t have been. She was killed, and I suffered a head injury that destroyed part of my memory—the two years before the accident—and you were part of the time I lost.” A mixture of anger and despair fired his glance. He nudged the robbery file she’d dropped on the floor when she’d stood. “I also learned about weapons then.”

His story was hard to believe. “Why did the wires say you died? Why did the Navy tell my father you were dead?”

“The Navy?”

“My dad asked Captain Kerwin Gould, your commanding officer, what happened and he spouted the story about a failed training mission off San Diego.”

“Your dad?” Zach nodded in recognition. “James Kendall, I get it. Did he mention you when he talked to Admiral Gould?”

“Admiral?”

Zach shook his head. “That’s his rank now. Did your father tell him you were pregnant?”

“No. I only wanted to find out what happened.”

“But he would’ve told your father the truth if he’d known. He gave you the story we discussed. It kept me out of the media. I didn’t want the public mess any more than the Navy did.” Failure filled his eyes with heartrending emptiness. He lifted his hand to the back of his neck, striking her dumb as he twisted his head, a grown-up version of Evan under stress. “I came home—here—after I left the hospital.”

“What about your apartment in Chicago?” Having a place suddenly made no sense. “Why did you— Your things were all over those rooms, pictures of your family—were they even your family?”

“Yes.” He rubbed his neck again. “The apartment belonged to the government. We were advised to bring our own belongings and make ourselves look like full-time residents. They figured one Navy officer in uniform looked like any other.” He sat on the corner of his desk. “I’m not even sure who packed my stuff and sent it home. It was just waiting when I got here.”

“But what about your career? You were gung ho.”

His faint smile softened the lines in his face. “I resigned because the surgeons decided my injury made me unfit to fly.”

Six years he’d been gone, and he’d never remembered she existed. “How can I believe you?”

He shook his head. “I don’t blame you. I’ve had to ask Admiral Gould or other pilots about what happened.” Guilt thinned his features. “I’ve listened to the crash tapes.”

She couldn’t ask for those details. They were too personal to him, too horrible to her. “How big is this team?”

“I have two friends who also went through the training.” He angled the photo so they could both see Evan’s innocent, laughing face. “You came here because of him? Why didn’t you just tell me the truth? Why pretend you wanted to interview me?”

She didn’t sugarcoat her answer. “I couldn’t trust you. You were dead until you showed up foiling a bank robbery.”

“Why didn’t you look for my family?”

“You talked about them, but reluctantly.” Heat swept up her throat. “I thought you didn’t want to tell them about me.”

“Because of my job.” She shared the desolation in his eyes. “I could skim over the facts, but I wouldn’t have felt safe involving you in my life outside Chicago.” He stared at Evan, not realizing he was telling her he hadn’t shared the depth of her feelings. “They’d have loved my son.”

“At the time I was—” The agony of losing him swept back for a moment, but he’d never really been hers to lose. She shouldn’t have come here. She blinked, gripping reality. Her son still needed his father, and Zach deserved explanations as much as she. “My dad was disappointed in me and I was scared, and later the idea of telling your family became as difficult as telling you is now.”

“What about a funeral?”

She glanced at the nearest window, where orange and red leaves brushed the glass and shielded the rest of Bardill’s Ridge from her view. “My face was in the news because I’d graduated from college, and my father’s important. I didn’t think I could hide who I was in a town this small.” And she hadn’t been up to pretending indifference.

“The boy makes everything different.”

“Different, how?”

“I want to see him.”

Good. She’d been hoping for that. “His name is Evan. Evan Zachary Kendall.”

He stared at his son’s face, a smile curving his mouth slowly, as if smiling no longer came easy.

“I wanted him to have something of yours. Your name was the only thing I could give him.”

“Thank you.”

Zach’s simple gratitude touched her, but she couldn’t let down her guard yet. She lived in Chicago. Zach lived here. They both had rights to Evan if Zach wanted access.

She grimaced. Access. A sterile term for making a life with a child.

“You can have the picture.” She latched her briefcase and lifted it, comforted by its familiar heft in her hand. A touch of the cynicism she’d learned after Zach’s disappearance came back to her. “I’m not a big fan of amnesia stories.”

He didn’t seem to care. “It’s the only one I have, and it’s true.”

Subjects who lied usually put on a big defensive show. But sometimes not.

“What you do next is up to you. I read that you have a daughter with your ex-wife, so I know you’re facing complications. If you really want to see Evan, you have to make a decision you can live with the rest of your life.”

He nodded, but she reiterated to make sure he understood.

“I mean this is a lifetime commitment.”