Whose Baby?

They saw each other at the same moment. The words she’d intended to speak trailed off. He had a violent moment of reaction to that damned resemblance to Rose. After a moment, he recognized it as anger. He hated seeing his daughter all grown up in a woman he didn’t know.

After that first shocked instance, Adam realized she was no longer looking at him. Her gaze devoured Rose. The book she held slipped from her hand and slapped to the floor. Heads turned, but Lynn Chanak kept staring.

“Daddy?” Rose said uncertainly. “Is that lady your friend?”

Friend. The way she was looking at his daughter scared the hell out of him.

“Yeah.” He swallowed. “This is my friend Lynn. Lynn, my daughter Rose.”

“I…” Lynn couldn’t seem to tear her eyes from the child. “I’m happy to meet you, Rose.”

In a sudden bout of shyness, Rose buried her face in his neck. She whispered, “Why is she looking at me so funny?”

“Maybe,” he whispered, too, “because your hair is the same color as hers. How many people have curls like my Rose?”

She giggled, but shakily, because even her three-year-old intuition knew something was up.

God, he thought with gritted teeth. They looked so much alike. Everyone in the store must notice. They probably all thought he was the proprietor’s ex-husband, and this her daughter. How was she going to explain the resemblance?

“Rose is anxious to meet Shelly,” he said, too loudly. He didn’t so much want to meet his daughter, as he wanted this woman to quit staring at Rose as if she were royalty. Or, hell, a baboon. Something she might never see again.

“I…” Lynn blinked and turned her head, cheeks pale and her eyes unfocused. “I…I’m not sure…”

He glanced around and saw that the shoppers had gone about their business. A young woman behind the counter was ringing up a purchase. At the same moment, a giggle wafted from the sunporch.

“I’m here, Mommy! Remember?”

The playhouse. It must be two-story, because framed in an upper window of the fake castle was a little girl’s face, flushed with delight because her presence had been a secret.

The rock that had been sitting in his stomach was suddenly a boulder, craggy and painful. It pressed his lungs until he couldn’t breathe.

Rose was wriggling, so he set her down without tearing his gaze from the child. He felt his lips move, knew they formed a name: Jennifer.

Even the voice. Sounding confident and open, she invited Rose to come up. Shyly his daughter went, bending to crawl across the mock drawbridge and inside. As if Rose couldn’t figure out how to climb a ladder, Shelly gave her directions and told her what she’d find up at the top and how Mom had said they’d go to the beach and did Rose like hot dogs ’cuz Mom said maybe that’s what they could have for lunch. The words flowed like a stream over stones, making a kind of song, and all as inevitable as water finding its way downhill.

Jennifer, he thought in agony.

She peeked out the window at him, her face, alight with laughter, looking for all the world like a nineteenth-century children’s book illustration of an elf perched on a flower stem. Shelly’s ears stuck out just a little. Jennifer had hated hers, though he had thought them cute. Just like Jennifer’s, Shelly’s face narrowed from high cheekbones to a pointy chin, and just like Jennifer’s, her eyes shimmered with amusement and devilment.

“It’s worse than seeing the picture, isn’t it?” the woman beside him said softly.

Taking a ragged breath, he turned his head and met Lynn Chanak’s eyes. “God.”

She nodded.

“Do you see yourself?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

“I suppose.” Like him, she gazed toward the playhouse. Neither girl was visible in the window, although whispers and laughter drifted out. “She does look like pictures of me at that age, but I don’t exactly remember my face in the mirror from when I was three, so it’s not quite as big a shock as Shelly must be for you.”

He fumbled for his wallet and, with shaking hands, took out a photo of his dead wife and handed it to Lynn.

She looked at it for a long moment. When she lifted her head, her gray-green eyes were misty. “She was beautiful.”

“Shelly is going to look like her.”

A tear dropped, shimmering, from her lash. She wiped it from her cheek. “Oh, I wish…”

“This hadn’t happened?”

She squeezed her eyes shut, as if willing back further tears. “No,” Lynn said finally. “Because then I wouldn’t have Shelly, and she’s my life. No, I was going to say, I wish we’d never found out. But now…” She gazed again toward the playhouse where first one girl’s laughing face, then the other, popped up. “But now, I’m not so sure.”

“Jennifer’s parents want to meet her,” he heard himself say.

Lynn squeezed her hands together without looking at him. “I thought they might. But how can we do that, without Shelly knowing who they are?”

“I told them they might have to wait.”

She smiled with obvious difficulty. “Thank you.”

“What about your parents? And your ex-husband’s?”

“My mother and stepfather love Shelly, and I’m sure they’ll love Rose, if you give them the chance. They’ll support whatever we decide. Brian’s parents…” She hesitated. “I don’t know. At the moment, he’s washed his hands of the whole thing. My pregnancy wasn’t planned, and…” She swallowed whatever she had been going to say, perhaps suddenly aware that she had been going to reveal too much that was private to a relative stranger. “Well,” she said, a little awkwardly. “Certainly there’s no rush, where they’re concerned. Right now, it’s just Shelly and me.”