“I’ll need to refinish the floor if you don’t sit down,” Curt said Saturday afternoon.
Like he could talk. He’d been drumming his fingers against the table for the last ten minutes. “If it needs to be done, I’ll help you.” She pulled out the chair next to him and sat. She’d invited Jordan over for one o’clock. It was five minutes until then now. If she’d been in Jordan’s position, she would’ve already arrived.
“She gets that habit from her dad,” Priscilla explained.
In the beginning, Taylor had planned for only her and Curt to meet with Jordan. After thinking about it, though, it seemed right to include Mom this afternoon.
“Reese played well this morning,” Curt said, clearly in an attempt to distract her.
Reese’s game had been at ten o’clock today. Like Coach Bruno told her, she’d played keeper first. She hadn’t let in a single goal. In the second half of the game, she’d scored one goal, and Hazel had scored the team’s other one.
Taylor nodded and rechecked her watch.
“I bet she gave my mom a play-by-play recap of the game in the car,” he continued.
Curt’s mom had met them at the house after the game and picked Reese up for the rest of the day. Reese hadn’t complained about the unexpected outing with Judith. She loved spending time with Curt’s mom as much as she did with her grandmother. And if anyone ever saw the two of them together, they’d assume they were a grandmother and granddaughter spending the day together. She’d noticed Curt’s mom treated Erin, Leah’s stepdaughter, the same way.
“I told Mom not to spoil Reese too much today,” Curt said.
Taking a page out of Curt’s book, Taylor started tapping her fingertips against the table. “And like Judith always does, she’ll ignore you.” The word “overboard” didn’t exist in Judith’s vocabulary.
“Probably, but everyone deserves to get spoiled sometimes.”
No sooner did he finish speaking than the doorbell rang. Although she’d been pacing moments ago, Taylor now found her butt glued to the chair. Perhaps everyone else suffered from the same ailment because no one moved a muscle.
“I’ll get it.” The first to move, Curt pushed his chair back and stood.
Curt’s voice broke whatever hold the chair had on her butt, and she stood too. “I should be with you. Mom, maybe you should stay here.”
Mom nodded as she took in a deep breath and slowly exhaled.
Based on her sister’s past and the type of friends she’d spent time with, Taylor expected to see someone who looked like Brad, Eliza’s kidnapping partner last year. The man standing on Curt’s front step was about as different from what she expected as one could get. Dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket, Jordan had short, light brown hair and looked as if he took good care of himself.
Why would you ever get involved with my sister? “Jordan?” Taylor asked rather than assume, because for all she knew, the man in front of her wanted to sell them something. After all, a few weeks earlier, a salesman had stopped by their house offering to give them a free estimate on all new windows.
Nodding, the man extended his hand, and again she wondered about how he met Eliza and why he’d ever spent time with her. “It’s nice to meet you,” Jordan said.
“Please come in.” She took several steps back so that he could enter. “Jordan, this is my fiancé, Curt.”
“I’ve seen pictures of you together.” As he’d done with her, Jordan shook Curt’s hand.
Okay, time to get this over with. As if reading her mind, Curt squeezed her hand. “We’ll be more comfortable in the kitchen,” she said.
They hadn’t discussed what type of man Jordan might be, but the way Mom’s eyes grew wide when she saw Jordan walk in the room told Taylor their assumptions had been similar.
“Jordan, this is my mother, Priscilla. I thought she should be here today too.”
Before sitting down, Jordan pulled an envelope from his back pocket and removed his jacket, revealing a wrinkle-free, dark green button-down shirt. “I brought the letter Eliza sent me. I thought you might like to see it. Please feel free to read it.”
Without hesitation, Taylor accepted the envelope and pulled out the letter. She recognized Eliza’s barely legible handwriting right away. It had always been so poor that it’d been common for teachers to make her redo assignments before they even tried to grade them in school.
Eliza had kept the letter short. In it, she didn’t ask how Jordan had been or what he’d been up to. Instead, Eliza explained she’d had a baby nine years ago, and she believed he might be her daughter’s father. She also mentioned that she’d given up custody to Taylor when Reese was about a year old and then provided him with Taylor and Priscilla’s home phone number. Eliza gave no explanation as to why she’d waited so long to reach out or why she felt the need to do so now. Eliza did, however, ask him to write back and let her know if he turned out to be Reese’s father.
“Do you want to read it, Mom?” she asked once done.
Mom considered the question before answering. “No. I don’t think I do.”
Taylor refolded the letter and handed it back. She’d share the contents of it with Curt later. “I’m guessing you never knew Eliza was pregnant when you were together?” She had a lot of questions, and this one seemed as good a place to start as anywhere.
Jordan took a sip from the water Curt had set in front of each of them before joining them at the table. “Eliza and I never had a, uh… exclusive relationship, I guess you’d say.” He glanced at her mom and cleared his throat. “Every once in a while, she’d call me and then come over. If she knew she was pregnant the last time we got together, she didn’t say anything.”
“Then you haven’t seen her in over nine years?” Taylor asked.
Jordan shook his head. “About two years ago, I ran into her at the mall in Nashua. I almost didn’t recognize her.”
Yeah, she could understand that. When Eliza had shown up at the door suddenly a few months before the kidnapping, Taylor had been shocked by the transformation in her sister’s appearance.
“She said she would call, but she never did. Honestly, at the time, I was glad she didn’t. But yeah, I’d say it’s been more than nine years since she was at my house,” Jordan explained.
In the long run, it didn’t matter, but she wanted to know. “How did you meet my sister?”
“At a party a mutual friend was having.”
That made sense. Eliza always loved a party.
“Has Eliza written to anyone else and given them the same news?” Jordan asked.
Great question. Taylor hoped not. If Jordan proved not to be Reese’s father, she didn’t want to go through this again.
“I’m not sure. I haven’t talked to my sister in more than a year. But when Eliza found out she was pregnant, she claimed she had no idea who the father was. I always assumed that meant there were more than two possibilities out there. So it is possible she reached out to more than just you.”
“Sounds like Eliza.” Jordan clasped his hands together on the table. “As I told you on the phone, I want to know if Reese is my daughter.”