Chapter 5 - The Shadow Sister
Hank walked over to the corner of the room, pulling a small silver key from behind a framed picture of a landscape. He opened an iron safe beneath the floorboards and brought out a stack of glossy photographs, all developed within the last five years.
I snatched them hungrily. My hands shook so intensely that the pictures rustled like dry leaves.
There she was. Not an infant, not a seven-year-old on a farm porch, but a grown woman in her late twenties. She had my high, defined cheekbones, my dark wavy hair tied back in a careless bun, and Gordon’s determined, slightly cleft chin. In one photograph, she was laughing outside a modest veterinary clinic, wearing light green surgical scrubs. In another, she was holding a golden retriever puppy, looking directly into the camera lens with those striking, unmistakable hazel eyes.
""Her name is Faye Walker,"" Hank explained, watching me drink in every contour of her face. ""Leland died of a stroke when she was sixteen. His wife had passed away years before that. When Leland died, Gordon intervened through an anonymous trust. That passbook savings account you found in the couch? Gordon scrimped every spare dime from your household budget, skipped lunches, took odd repair jobs on weekends, and fed that fund to pay for her boarding school, her college tuition, and her veterinary medical degree.""
""Why didn't he tell me?"" I sobbed, clutching the photographs against my chest as if I could pull the woman in the paper through my skin. ""Thirty years, Hank! Thirty years of crying on Clara’s birthday! Thirty years of looking at an empty bedroom! How could he watch me bleed inside every single day and keep this locked in his throat?""
""Because Gordon was a coward who loved you more than his own salvation,"" Hank said harshly, though his eyes were wet. ""He knew that if he told you, you would never look at him without seeing the man who traded your baby in a hospital hallway. He knew you would despise him. He believed that the only way to keep your family together—to keep your second daughter, Sarah, safe and happy—was to bear the damnation by himself.""
""Sarah,"" I gasped. Sarah was our twenty-eight-year-old daughter. The daughter who had begged me to sell the couch. The daughter who thought she was an only child who had merely lost an older sister before she was born.
""Does Sarah know?""
""No,"" Hank said. ""Nobody knew except me, Gordon, and Dr. Finch. And Gordon made me swear on a stack of Bibles that these papers would stay under the padding of that sofa until both of you were dead and buried. He never intended for you to find this, Martha. He was terrified of you hating his memory.""
""Where is Faye right now?"" I demanded, standing up, my legs trembling but steady with a ferocious new purpose. ""Give me the town. Give me the clinic.""
Hank pulled a business card from the ledger. Faye Walker, D.V.M. – Oakridge Animal Hospital.
Oakridge. It was a small mountain town barely forty-five miles east of my front porch. Forty-five miles. For three decades, while I shopped for groceries, tended my hydrangeas, and laid plastic lilies on an empty plot of dirt, my flesh and blood had been living one county over.
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""Be careful, Martha,"" Hank warned, placing a heavy, weathered hand on my shoulder as I reached for the doorknob. ""Faye doesn't know she was adopted through a black-market handshake. She thinks Leland was her biological father who died when she was young. If you drop the sky on her head without warning, you might break her completely.""
""I have spent thirty years mourning a gravestone with an empty box underneath it,"" I said, looking Gordon's brother dead in the eye. ""I am going to see my daughter.""
