Fifteen minutes after he’d settled Ruby in the crib, just as he’d expected, she woke up with a loud wail. By the time he reached in to pick her up, she was holding on to the bars like a little prisoner, tear tracks wet on her rosy cheeks.
“It’s okay,” he said softly. “I’m here.”
She didn’t smile as he picked her up, simply let out a jagged sigh of relief as he drew her close against him.
Catching sight of their reflection in a full-length mirror on the back of the door, he noted that this was how the two of them had been connected since he’d taken custody of her three weeks ago. Apart from Ruby’s sporadic naps, and when she settled into her crib for, at best, six hours each night, he was tethered to his six-month-old niece around the clock.
She was the only person on earth who truly mattered to him…even though he hadn’t known she existed three weeks ago.
CHAPTER TWO
Three weeks earlier…
Flynn didn’t recognize the number of the caller who had been trying to reach him for the past hour. He always turned his phone to do-not-disturb mode while he wrote, to minimize distractions, so he hadn’t realized anyone had been calling until he took his first break. After a handful of brushes with the paparazzi a few years back, he no longer accepted voice mail from numbers that weren’t in his contacts list.
As he stared at the area code from the town where he’d grown up, his chest tightened. Had it finally happened? Had someone put two and two together and realized that Flynn Stewart wasn’t who he claimed to be?
He’d run from his past for nearly two decades, but he’d always known he wouldn’t be able to run forever. No one could—not even a man who was a master at creating fictional stories that seemed more true than real life.
Flynn closed his laptop on his screenplay in progress and took a deep breath before hitting the redial button. Only, when the woman with the cigarette-worn voice began speaking, there was no relief in realizing she wasn’t calling to expose him—she didn’t even know his name, calling him Fred instead of Flynn. Instead, what she told him stunned him speechless.
His long-lost sister had not only died of an overdose, she’d also given birth to a daughter a little more than five months before.
Grief and guilt pummeled him, harder than any of his father’s blows ever had.
All his life, Flynn had tried to protect his sister from their parents. When Flynn had left for Los Angeles at seventeen, he’d begged Sarah to come with him. But at sixteen, she’d already been lost to him, deep-diving into the same world of drugs and alcohol as their parents.
A year later—after their father had died in jail, with their mother subsequently drinking herself into an early grave—Flynn went back to Centertown, Illinois, to see Sarah. He pleaded with her to start over, to let him stage an intervention, to help her create a new and better life. He told her she could start over in Los Angeles, that she could be anyone she wanted to be, that she could shed her past like it was nothing more than a torn, dirty coat. But though she took the money he offered, she said she couldn’t leave her friends or her boyfriend.
Every year he came back to try again to persuade her to leave, until a little over a year ago, when Sarah had told him that she knew how much he hated coming back to their hometown and that he didn’t need to make the trip anymore. She’d sworn that his secrets were safe with her. She’d told him she was happy all his dreams had come true when he’d become Flynn Stewart. But she’d insisted she didn’t have it in her to change herself and her life the way he had. She’d claimed they would both be better off apart, because then he would stop hoping fruitlessly for her to leave her life behind, and she would stop hating herself for disappointing him.
If only he’d guessed that she’d been hiding her pregnancy from him…
She must have known if he’d learned she was going to have a baby, he would never have taken no for an answer. He would have made her leave Centertown once and for all. He would have forced her to get the help she needed with her addictions. He would have shown her and her child that there was a world out there beyond her wildest dreams.
Flynn took the next flight out of LAX, careful once he landed to alter his look with dark-framed glasses, a baseball cap, and a worn pair of jeans and a faded T-shirt so that no one would recognize him.
It didn’t matter how many years had passed, Centertown looked no different than it had when he was a kid. Despair lingered in the air, especially on the street corners where people were either looking for their next hit, or had already passed out from their last one.
Flynn stopped dead in his tracks when he looked through the window of the run-down, greasy diner and caught sight of Ruby sitting in a worn, dirty stroller.
She was the spitting image of his sister when she’d been a baby, with curly brown hair and big brown eyes. His chest clenched hard. Sarah was the only person Flynn had ever loved with his whole heart, holding nothing back.
Now, Ruby was the second.
As he slid into the booth across from Sarah’s “friend,” he knew from one look at her calculating, heavily made-up eyes made it clear that she wasn’t simply going to hand Ruby over out of the goodness of her heart.
“Sarah said if anything ever happened to her, to call the name and number on this.” It was a takeout menu from Pizza Peddler, the restaurant where Flynn and Sarah had had their last meal together. “She tried hard to stay clean while she was pregnant,” the woman said with a shrug. He guessed Sarah wasn’t the first person this woman knew who had overdosed. “Who are you anyway?” she asked. “You don’t look like her usual type.”
Flynn knew exactly what his sister’s usual type was. A strung-out bully, just like their father. “I’m a friend from a while back,” was all he said. Wanting to get Ruby away from her—and this place—as quickly as possible, he covertly slid over an envelope containing five thousand dollars in hundreds. “Thank you for calling me.” Just thinking of what might have happened to Ruby if the woman had called anyone else made his stomach turn. Thank God she’d followed his sister’s instructions.
Frankly, he would have paid any amount to get his niece the hell away from this woman, which was why he had plenty of backup bills ready to hand over if necessary. But five grand was more than enough to put skates on the woman’s feet. She was gone so fast with his money, her seat at the diner practically smoked after she left.
Meanwhile, Ruby sat quietly in the dirty stroller and watched him with eyes that, thankfully, were still full of innocence.
He stared back, not knowing how to talk to a child, never mind a baby. Silently, he reminded himself that he wrote dialogue for fictional characters all day long. After all, Flynn Stewart was the first character he’d ever created, a guy with such a faultless, by-the-book, squeaky-clean past that no one had ever delved deeper to see if any of it was actually true. Surely he could figure out what to say to his niece.
“Hi, Ruby. I’m your Uncle Flynn,” he said softly. “I’m going to take care of you now.”
She stared at him for long enough that he half wondered if she could understand what was happening. Was there any way she could realize that she’d lost her mother forever and was now about to head halfway across the country with a total stranger?