Baby In The Making

“Well, I had a meeting with one of their partners this afternoon.”

Yeager couldn’t quite hide his surprise that someone like her would be in touch with such a financial powerhouse, though he was obviously trying to. Hannah appreciated his attempt to be polite, but it was unnecessary. She wasn’t bothered by being working class, nor was she ashamed of her upbringing. Even if she didn’t talk freely about her past, she’d never tried to hide it, and she wasn’t apologetic about the way she lived now. She’d done pretty well for herself and lived the best life she could. She was proud of that.

Still, she replied, “I know. They’re not exactly my social stratum. But I didn’t contact them. They contacted me.”

“About?” he asked.

“About the fact that I’m apparently New York’s equivalent to the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia.”

Now Yeager looked puzzled. So she did her best to explain. Except she ended up not so much explaining as just pouring out her guts into his lap.

Without naming names, and glossing over many of the details, she told him about her discovery that she’d been born to a family she never knew she had in a town she would have sworn she’d never visited. She told him about her father’s addiction and abuse and about her mother’s custodial kidnapping of her. She told him about their false identities and their move from Scarsdale to Staten Island. She told him about her mother’s death when she was three and her entry into the foster care system, where she’d spent the next fifteen years. And she told him about how, in a matter of minutes today, she went from living the ordinary life of a seamstress to becoming one of those long-lost heirs to a fortune who seemed only to exist in over-the-top fiction.

Through it all, Yeager said not a word. When she finally paused—not that she was finished talking by a long shot, because there was still so much more to tell him—he only studied her in silence. Then he lifted the glass of wine he had been holding through her entire story and, in one long quaff, drained it.

And then he grimaced, too. Hard. “That,” he finally said, “was unbelievable.”

“I know,” Hannah told him. “But it’s all true.”

He shook his head. “No, I mean the wine. It was unbelievably bad.”

“Oh.”

“Your life is... Wow.”

For a moment he only looked out at her little apartment without speaking. Then he looked at Hannah again.

And he said, “This isn’t the kind of conversation to be having over unbelievably bad wine.”

“It isn’t?”

He shook his head. “No. This is the kind of conversation that needs to be had over extremely good Scotch.”

“I don’t have any Scotch.” And even if she did, it wouldn’t be extremely good.

He roused a smile. “Then we’ll just have to go find some, won’t we?”

Three (#ufd32c605-406a-5634-b386-3da22488176a)

Instead of extremely good Scotch, they found a sufficiently good Irish whiskey at a pub up the street from Hannah’s apartment. She’d ducked into the bathroom to change before they’d left, trading her shorts for a printed skirt that matched her shirt and dipping her feet into a pair of flat sandals. By the time the bartender brought their drinks to them at a two-seater cocktail table tucked into the corner of the dimly lit bar, she was beginning to feel a little more like herself.

Until she looked at Yeager and found him eyeing her with a scrutiny unlike any she’d ever had from him before. Normally he showed her no more interest than he would...well, a seamstress who was sewing some clothes for him. Sure, the two of them bantered back and forth whenever he was in the shop, but it was the kind of exchange everybody shared with people they saw in passing on any given day—baristas, cashiers, doormen, that kind of thing. In the shop, his attention passed with the moments. But now...

Now, Yeager Novak’s undivided attention was an awesome thing. His sapphire eyes glinted like the gems they resembled, and if she’d fancied he could see straight into her soul before, now she was certain of it. Her heart began to hammer hard in her chest, her blood began to zip through her veins and her breathing became more shallow than it had been all day. This time, though, the reactions had little to do with the news of her massive potential inheritance and a lot to do with Yeager.

He must have sensed her reaction—hyperventilation was generally a dead giveaway—because he nudged her glass closer to her hand and said, “Take a couple sips of your drink. Then tell me again about how you ended up in Staten Island.”

She wanted to start talking now, but she did as he instructed and enjoyed a few slow sips of her whiskey. She wasn’t much of a drinker, usually sticking to wine or some sissy, fruit-sprouting drink. The liquor was smooth going down, warming her mouth and throat and chest. She closed her eyes to let it do its thing, then opened them again to find Yeager still studying her. She was grateful for the dim lighting of the bar. Not just because it helped soothe her rattled nerves but because it might mask the effect he was having on her.

“According to Mr. Fiver,” she said, “my mother got help from a group of women who aided other women in escaping their abusers. They paid counterfeiters to forge new identities for both of us—fake social security numbers, fake birth certificates, the works. I don’t know how my mother found them, but she needed them because my father’s family was super powerful and probably could have kept her from leaving him or, at least, made sure she couldn’t take me with her.”

“And just who was your father’s family?”

Hannah hesitated. During her internet search of her birth name, she had come across a number of items about her and her mother’s disappearance from Scarsdale a quarter century ago. Some of them had been articles that appeared in newspapers and magazines shortly after the fact, but many of them were fairly current on “unsolved mystery” type blogs and websites. It had been singularly creepy to read posts about herself from strangers speculating on her fate. Some people were convinced Stephen Linden had beaten his wife and daughter to death and disposed of their bodies, getting away with murder, thanks to his social standing. Some thought baby Amanda had been kidnapped by strangers for ransom and that her mother had interrupted the crime and been killed by the perpetrators, her body dumped in Long Island Sound. Other guesses were closer to the truth: that Alicia escaped her abusive marriage with Amanda in tow and both were living now in the safety of a foreign country.

What would Yeager make of all this?

Since Hannah had already told him so much—and still had a lot more to reveal—she said, “My father’s name was Stephen Linden. He died about twenty years ago. It was my recently deceased grandfather, Chandler Linden, who was looking for me and wanted to leave me the family fortune.”

Yeager studied her in silence for a moment. Then he said, “You’re Amanda Linden.”

She had thought he would remark on her grandfather’s identity, not hers. But she guessed she shouldn’t be surprised by his knowing about Amanda’s disappearance, too, since so many others did.

“You know about that,” she said.

He chuckled. “Hannah, everyone knows about that. Any kid who was ever curious about unsolved crimes has read about the disappearance of Amanda Linden and her mother.” He lifted a shoulder and let it drop. “When I was in middle school, I wanted to be a private investigator. I was totally into that stuff.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t,” she said. “I had no idea any of this happened. Let alone that it happened to me.”

She took another sip of her drink and was surprised by how much she liked the taste. Since Yeager had ordered it, it was doubtless the best this place had. Maybe her Linden genes just had a natural affinity for the finer things in life. She sipped her drink again.

“So you were destined for a life of wealth and privilege,” Yeager said, “and instead, you grew up in the New York foster care system.”

“Yep.”

“And how was that experience?”

Hannah dropped her gaze to her drink, dragging her finger up and down the side of the glass. “It wasn’t as terrible as what some kids go through,” she said. “But it wasn’t terrific, either. I mean a couple of times I landed in a really good place, with really good people. But just when I started to think maybe I’d found a spot where I fit in and could be reasonably happy for a while, I always got yanked out and put somewhere else where I didn’t fit in and wasn’t particularly happy.”

She glanced up to find that he was looking at her as if she were some interesting specimen under a microscope. A specimen he couldn’t quite figure out. So she returned her attention to her glass.

“That was the worst part, you know?” she continued. “Never feeling like I belonged anywhere. Never feeling like I had a real home or a real family. Now I know that I could have and should have—that I actually did have—both. The irony is that if I’d grown up as Amanda Linden, with all her wealth and privilege, I would have had a terrifying father who beat up my mother and very well could have come after me. Foster care was no picnic, but I was never physically abused. Dismissed and belittled, yeah. Neglected, sure. But never harmed. As Amanda, though...”

She didn’t finish the statement. She didn’t dare. She didn’t even want to think about what kind of life she might have lived if her mother hadn’t rescued her from it. What kind of life her mother had endured for years before her daughter’s safety had compelled her to run.

“Some people would argue that neglect and belittlement are harm,” Yeager said softly.

“Maybe,” she conceded. “But I’d rather be neglected and belittled and shuffled around and have nothing to my name than live in the lap of luxury and go through what my mother must have gone through to make her escape the way she did. I just wish she’d had more time to enjoy her life once she got it back.”

And Hannah wished she’d had more time herself to get to know her mother. Mary Robinson, formerly Alicia Linden, might very well have saved her daughter’s life—both figuratively and literally. Yet Hannah had no way to thank her.

“Your grandfather, Chandler Linden, was a billionaire,” Yeager said in the same matter-of-fact tone he’d been using all night.

Hannah’s stomach pitched to have the knowledge she’d been carrying around in her head all evening spoken aloud. Somehow, having it out in the open like that made it so much more real. Her heart began to thunder again and her vision began to swim. Hyperventilation would come next, so she enjoyed another, larger, taste of her drink in an effort to stave it off.

“Yeah,” she said quietly when she set her glass on the table. “He was.”

“Which means that now you’re a billionaire,” Yeager said in the same casual tone.