Searching for Cate Read online

  There was a slight pang in her stomach. She tried not to think of Gabe. “Since there’s little chance of there ever being a firstborn, let me take you out to lunch the next time I’m up there.”

  “You’re coming back?”

  He sounded eager, which she thought was sweet. She’d always liked Jeremy, thinking of him as a slightly unkempt younger brother, even though in reality he was a couple of months older than she was.

  As to what she’d just said to him, she’d meant coming back to Frisco for a visit. His question made her stop to consider. And realize again that from where she was standing, her future was undecided and murky.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. We’ll see.” She knew nothing was going to be decided until after she’d met with her birth mother and eradicated the hollow feeling she’d been carrying around inside of her for the past three weeks. “First I need to take care of these loose ends.”

  Everyone who knew Cate knew she was like a bulldog with a bone. Once she clamped down on something, she wouldn’t let go until it was resolved to her satisfaction.

  “Just don’t let them strangle you. Pleasant dreams, Cate.”

  “Yeah, you, too.”

  But even as she hung up the receiver and stifled another huge yawn, Cate knew she wasn’t going to get any sleep, not tonight. If she forced herself to remain in bed, all she was going to wind up doing was counting the minutes as they trickled their way into dawn. And then count more minutes as she waited for a decent time to arrive before she showed up on her birth mother’s doorstep.

  Glancing at the address and phone number she’d written in the newspaper margins, she decided that she needed to transcribe both while they still looked reasonably readable.

  After that, she promised herself, she’d see about maybe unpacking a few more things.

  Cate’s hand felt damp on the receiver as she gripped it, her fingers tightly holding the mouthpiece. Her hand was so sweaty, she was surprised that the receiver didn’t just slip out of it.

  The line on the other end was ringing. She silently counted the number of rings.

  She’d waited until eight o’clock, forcing herself to shower and get dressed before she made the call. To hear the voice of the woman who had rejected her. Granted, she’d wound up in a home most kids only dreamed about, rich in love if not possessions, but it could have easily gone another way. She could have landed in an abusive home.

  Or worse.

  Her birth mother had no way of knowing what her fate was to have been when she gave her away. Right now, it was very hard not to be resentful, if not downright angry with the woman.

  “Hello?”

  The high-pitched female voice that answered the telephone on the fourth ring sounded way too young to be the woman she was seeking. Joan had been seventeen when she was born. That would make her forty-four or forty-five now. The person on the other end of the line was definitely not forty-five.

  Her mouth felt like cotton. Cate forced herself to speak. “Hello, this is Catherine Kowalski. Is this Joan Cunningham?”

  There was a short, breathless, nervous laugh. It was as if the girl was unaccustomed to speaking to people. “No, this is Rebecca.”

  That would be Joan’s daughter, Cate thought. There was a pause, after which Cate pressed on. “Then may I speak to Joan, please?”

  “Sorry, she’s not here.”

  Damn it, she’d waited too long. Joan had left the house for the day. According to what she’d found, her birth mother worked as an interior designer in one of those small, trendy stores along the Pacific Coast Highway. Athena and Daughter.

  With effort, she managed to rein in her impatience. “What time will she be back?” Cate asked politely.

  “I’m not really sure,” the girl responded. “My mom’s in the hospital.”

  Chapter 8

  Christian flipped the chart closed and frowned. This was the downside of his job and he hated it.

  He never minded being roused out of bed at some ungodly hour of the night or predawn to help bring a new life into the world. Even in his worst moments, when the futility of life got to be too much for him, there was something indescribably exhilarating about holding a brand-new human being in his hands. About seeing eyes open for the very first time. About seeing a tiny chest rise and fall as a baby took its first breath. All of it humbled him.

  And made him feel hope.

  Hope was what he tried to dispense now to Joan Cunningham, the woman in room 527. Hope that the life she cherished so much was not going to be cruelly yanked away from her now, in the prime of her life.

  He knew she was frightened. Who wouldn’t be in her place? She’d come to his office two days ago with huge eyes and a tremor in her voice. Even as she spoke, there was a silent plea in her eyes, a plea for him to tell her that her fears were unfounded.

  He wished he could. But the test results indicated otherwise.

  Walking into her hospital room, he tried hard to appear upbeat. It wasn’t easy for him. The moment she saw him enter, the woman stiffened as if she were anticipating a physical blow.

  He spoke quietly, softly, hoping to soothe her. “Joan, I’m afraid there’s no way to say this except to say it, so we’re going to get the bad part over with first.” Christian realized that he was bracing himself as much as his patient was. “The tumor appears to be malignant.”

  Joan’s long, delicate hands flew up to her mouth as she tried to keep the sob back. She paled, growing whiter than her sheet. He knew one could be braced for the worst, but never fully be prepared for it. Losing Alma had proven that to him.

  “Oh God,” Joan cried. “Oh God, oh God.”

  “But,” he continued gently, taking her hand and holding it tightly, as if to anchor her to the world, “there is every indication that once we remove it, everything’ll be fine.”

  “It?” Her voice was hollow, numb, as she repeated the single word. Her hand went to her right breast, covering it protectively. Joan was terrified. “You mean my breast?”

  He empathized even if he could not relate. “No, just the tumor.”

  It would have been prudent to add “For now” and cover his bases, but Christian refused to do that to the woman. Refused to hedge at her expense. They’d cross each bridge when they came to it. And they might not have to make that final journey. For now, that was all he was going to focus on.

  “It’s very, very tiny,” he assured her. “I’ve already spoken to the surgeon. You can be scheduled for surgery as early as this afternoon.” He saw fear rise in her eyes. She had to be feeling that things were careering beyond her control. In her place, he knew he would. Christian did what he could to make her feel that it wasn’t all out of her reach. “The final decision, of course, is yours.”

  Joan nervously passed her tongue over her lips as she raised her eyes to his. “What’s your opinion?”

  He gave her the benefit of his experience—and all the extensive reading he’d done on the subject. Christian didn’t believe in entering into a situation unprepared. “I think an aggressive course of action is the most effective way to go. Have the operation and recover. Your life’ll be on track again soon.”

  Joan swallowed hard. The lump in her throat was almost choking her. That’s all she needed, another lump, she thought cynically. Her fingers dug into his hand as her eyes searched his face. “Do you promise?”

  His profession had long since gotten away from making promises. The day of the promise had gone the way of exchanging medical services for a chicken and three potatoes. These days, people were far too eager to sue over the smallest of things, and this was by no means a small thing. But he couldn’t divorce himself from his patients, couldn’t think of them as merely names on a file, statistics in a computer, the way so many of his colleagues did.

  That wasn’t his way. His way was to care. Usually too much.

  Christian closed his hand around hers and looked into her eyes. “I promise.”

  Joan let out a shaky breath. N
ervously, she ran her hand through her pale reddish hair and wondered if she was going to lose it in the treatment. She’d always been so proud of her hair. So vain. “I should discuss this with my husband.”

  He moved over to the telephone on the nightstand beside her bed, picked up the receiver and handed it to her.

  “Call him.” And then he nodded toward the door. “I’ll be back in a little while. I have a few other patients to see to.”

  Joan nodded mechanically. She looked like a woman whose whole world had been turned upside down, and who could blame her? he thought. It had. And he of all people could identify with the helpless feeling that had to be coursing through her veins.

  With any luck, though, all this would be temporary and they would have her back on her feet soon. In his case, the helpless feeling was permanent. Nothing was ever going to change that.

  He heard Joan begin to press the numbers that would connect her to her husband’s telephone at work. He moved out of the room to give her privacy.

  Preoccupied, Christian walked right into a woman standing directly outside Joan’s door. The impact was sudden and startling.

  He had close to a foot on her and nearly knocked her to the floor. Instinct had Christian’s hand shooting out to grabbed her and keep the woman from falling. Pulling too hard, he wound up pulling her into him. He was vaguely aware of soft breasts brushing against him a second before he stepped back.

  He was also mildly aware of the buzz of electricity just before contact was broken.

  “Sorry.”

  The woman, blond, twenty-ish and dressed for business, shrugged and forced a smile to her lips. “My fault.”

  He could feel her eyes sweeping over him, as if she was trying to place him. Did he know her? No, he was fairly confident he would have remembered a woman who looked like her.

  Christian sank his hands deep into the pockets of his lab coat. The almost pleasant hum throughout his body had yet to cease, even though he willed it to. “Are you looking for someone?”

  Still staring at him, she appeared to hesitate before finally answering. “An outpatient here.”

  Only two of the patients on the floor were his. The others were in the maternity ward two floors up. The woman with the soft smile would do best to ask for her friend’s room number where the names were listed.

  “The nurses’ station is right over there.” He pointed it out to her.

  Cate had already been there. It was her first stop off the elevator, despite the fact that she had asked for Joan Cunningham’s room number at the information desk on the ground floor. “I know. They sent me here.”

  He had a full schedule even without assisting at Joan’s lumpectomy this afternoon. But he noticed that the young woman was looking at the door behind him as if that was her intended goal. The small bit of curiosity he still retained got the better of him. “Who is it you’re looking for?”

  “Joan,” she told him. “Cunningham,” the woman added after a moment, as if the surname was difficult for her to work her tongue around.

  Moving slightly for a better light, he looked at her more closely. And realized that, despite the different hair color, there was a resemblance between the two women, especially around the mouth and eyes. Younger, fixed up, Joan Cunningham must have been a very pretty woman.

  This woman, however, was beautiful. Even in the muted lavender suit, with her silver-blond hair pulled back and away from her face, she was more than just striking. With very little effort, she could have been—what was it that his brother John called it?—drop-dead gorgeous.

  He’d never met any of Joan’s relatives. Was this her daughter? A younger sister? They seemed to be too far apart for the latter, too close for the former. But then, anything was possible these days.

  “Are you related to Joan?”

  As he watched, the woman straightened her shoulders, pulling them back as if she was bracing herself for something.

  “Yes.”

  At least, that was what she thought, Cate added silently. If the woman in the room behind this door turned out to really be the Joan Cunningham, nee Haywood, that she was looking for.

  Nerves danced through her. Taunting her. She hadn’t felt this unsettled even on her very first day out of Quantico, facing her first real boss. But she’d had confidence in herself then.

  This was different.

  The more he looked at the woman, the more he was certain that she was related to Joan. And if she was a relative, she couldn’t have timed her appearance better. Joan looked ready to fold when he’d talked to her. There was no doubt in his mind that she was going to need all the support she could get. Even with all the positive feedback he’d given her before she’d gone in for her test, and despite the fact that the numbers were increasing every day regarding survival rate, this news had to be devastating for Joan.

  “She’s on the phone right now,” he told the woman. “Trying to reach her husband with the news. But any encouragement you can give her will be very good.”

  “Encouragement?” Cate didn’t like the sound of that. “What’s wrong with her?”

  Telling her wasn’t his call. His role here was limited, which at times frustrated him. “You’ll have to ask her.”

  Cate nodded, really expecting nothing less by way of an answer. Joan’s daughter hadn’t been very informative, either, when she’d spoken to her on the phone earlier. But that was probably because she really didn’t know what was going on. The girl was eighteen, too young to be burdened with anything that might be happening behind hospital walls. Her mother was undoubtedly keeping this from her. Whatever “this” was.

  “I will,” she told him. Moving around him, Cate rapped once on the door, then opened it. She assumed that the dark-haired doctor with the electric-blue eyes had gone on his way.

  The moment she slipped into the room and closed the door behind her, Cate forgot all about the physician she’d encountered. Forgot about everything except for the woman she saw sitting up in the hospital bed.

  The irony of the situation was not lost on her.

  A little more than four weeks ago, she was entering another hospital room more than four hundred miles to the north. Entering it to say goodbye to her mother, although she didn’t realize it at the time. Her mother slipped into a coma that evening and died twelve days later.

  And now here she was, walking into another hospital room, attending possibly another sickbed; this time, though, it was to say hello to her mother. Another mother.

  A host of emotions charged through Cate, riding horses with jagged hooves. There was anger, sorrow, joy and so much more. Too much to sort through and catalog. She felt as if she had no room in which to think.

  The woman in the bed—was that really her birth mother?—was talking on the phone just as the doctor had told her. Unable to help herself, Cate listened. The redhead’s voice was shaky. As shaky as the hands that were desperately clutching the receiver.

  “I’m going through with it,” she said to the person on the other end of the line. “I just wanted you to know. Dr. Graywolf said it was important to do it as quickly as possible.”

  The familiar name had her snapping to attention. Dr. Graywolf? Was her partner’s husband this woman’s doctor? Just how small was the world? Cate wondered.

  The fact that there was someone in the room, silently watching her, slowly penetrated the wall of fear around Joan. She murmured “I love you” to her husband and then hung up the phone, her eyes now on the young woman in her room. An eerie feeling wafted through her, as if this wasn’t real. As if none of this ever since she’d first detected the thickness on her right breast was real.

  As if she was looking into the mirror and seeing into the past.

  Joan cleared her throat, her nervousness growing. “Can I help you?”

  Cate kept looking at the woman in the bed, searching for some foolproof sign. All the while knowing that there wouldn’t be one. “That all depends.”

  “On what?” Joan wh
ispered the words, now clearly frightened.

  Cate took a single step toward her, then stopped. She was afraid that the woman would pass out if she came any closer. Did she know? On some instinctive level, did Joan sense that she was her mother?

  Cate put her thoughts into words. “On whether you’re willing to admit that you’re my mother.”

  Chapter 9

  The woman in the bed drew in a sharp breath. “Excuse me?”

  Cate’s heart was in her throat as she confronted a piece of her life. The very air felt still, despite the soft whoosh made by the air-conditioning system.

  Was this woman lying in a hospital bed, looking small, frightened and disoriented, really her biological mother, or had Jeremy’s information led them in the wrong direction?

  She searched for signs of resemblance and thought she saw a few, but her desire to belong could have colored her perception. Maybe she looked like her father. So far, the only picture she’d managed to find of Jimmy Rollins was his last DMV photo. In true DMV fashion, the photograph was terrible.

  “My mother,” Cate repeated. The word tasted chalky on her tongue. Part of her felt disloyal to Julia for even addressing someone else by that name, but part of her felt this need to connect, to still be someone’s daughter. The confidence with which she’d helmed her life was nowhere in sight.

  Joan pressed the button on the side railing, moving the bed into more of an upright position. She struggled to get hold of herself.

  This can’t be happening, it wasn’t real.

  She was still reeling from what Dr. Graywolf had just told her, she couldn’t handle this on top of that.

  Despite the reading about breast cancer that she’d done, despite having talked to several women at her club who had lived through the horror that she now faced, she’d discovered in the last five minutes that she wasn’t prepared at all. Not emotionally. Not for this horrible gut-twisting feeling that threatened to cut off her very air. She felt trapped, unable to know which way to run or where.

  And Ron, well, Ron didn’t know how to deal with anything that couldn’t be solved with some kind of an elaborate mathematical equation. Her husband of the last twenty-two years had all his emotions stored somewhere in a bank vault and she had no idea what the combination to it was.