“So once he realized no one was missing me, he simply kept me rather than stirring up the beehive and taking the risk of losing me.”
“That would be my guess.” He took a breath and blew it out. “I want you to know that if for one minute I thought you’d be better off without Patrick, I would have said something. But the two of you were bonded in a way that was truly special. It would have killed you both if the courts decided a single cop wasn’t the best match for a traumatized three-year-old.”
“I’m glad you didn’t say anything. I love my dad. He was the best dad anyone could ever want. If he had to cut corners in order to keep us together, I’m happy about that. But I do have to wonder how he happened to have the photo.”
“Yeah,” Gil sighed. “I’ve been noodling on that the whole time we’ve been talking. If he truly did find you in the middle of a burning building on Christmas Eve, and he really had no idea who you were or how you came to be there, then how did he happen to have a photo of you taken months before? That part makes no sense at all.”
“Do you remember him looking for my identity?” I asked. “He told me later when I’d asked that he’d looked and looked but never could figure out who I was or where I’d come from. Do you remember him doing that? Searching?”
“No,” Gil admitted. “Not really. I remember he told me that he couldn’t figure out who you were, so he named you after his mother.”
My name is Arial. The voice of the child I’d met this morning echoed through my mind.
Suddenly it hit me. I was three years old when my dad found me. When I’d asked three-year-old Arial her name, she’d replied without even having to think about it. It was true that I’d spent very little time around three-year-olds, which probably is why I’d never questioned my father’s story before this, but apparently, three-year-olds knew their name.
“I was three years old when Dad found me,” I voiced the thought I’d just had.
“Yeah. So?”
“You have children. How old were they when they first learned their name?”
Gil didn’t answer. I wished I could see his face since I was certain he was frowning.
“By the time I was three, I would have known my name,” I finally said when he still hadn’t answered after quite a few seconds. “I’m not sure why I never realized that before.”
“Yeah,” Gil agreed, almost reluctantly. “You would have known your name, but maybe you were traumatized and wouldn’t talk, or maybe the trauma caused you to forget.”
“My dad never once mentioned that I had amnesia and couldn’t remember who I was. He simply said he didn’t know who I was and named me after his mother. I know my dad’s last name was Holloway, so that part fits. Was his mother even named Ainsley?”
He blew out a breath. “I don’t know. I never met anyone from Patrick’s family. I think he mentioned that they’d been dead for a long time when we first met.”
“He told me that his mother had recently died when he found me, which is why he named me after her.” I paused to think about it. “When I was at the house, I remembered that my sister was named Avery. I haven’t been able to confirm this, but I know it to be true. My memory is really fragmented, but I don’t remember ever being called anything other than Ainsley.” I closed my eyes and tried to remember back to the time I spent at the house on the bluff. I remembered the woman who I think I called Mama. Although, there were times when I tried to remember Mommy, and the woman who flashed into my mind was a different woman than the one in the photo. I remembered a man, but I didn’t remember much about him. The only people I could clearly connect with were the baby, Avery, and Mr. Johnson, the groundskeeper, who had shown me where to hide my baby birds.
“So, do you think that Ainsley is your real name?” Gil asked.
“I think it might be. I have to admit I don’t feel a sense of certainty about that, however. And if Ainsley is my real name, why would Dad tell me I was named after his mother? It would be easy enough for me to check, although I have to admit I never have.”
“Yeah, it doesn’t track that your dad would make that part up. Maybe you did know your name, but your dad had a reason for not wanting anyone to know that you were with him, so he changed it. You were three, so you most likely would have accepted the new name rather easily.”
Okay, this entire conversation was freaking me out. If my dad had changed my name to protect me, then he must have known who I really was all along. “I’m beginning to think the story about the fire was made up.”
“I will admit that something odd seems to have occurred, and there does seem to be a few holes in the story your father told both of us, but I know there was a fire,” Gil countered. “On that exact Christmas Eve. Your dad and I had been working a case for months and getting nowhere. I know for a fact that your dad did follow up on a tip to check out the warehouse, and he did pick up a lead that led to the arrest of the man we’d been after. I don’t know without a reasonable doubt that he found you at that warehouse. The best I can tell, if he did find you in the building, he simply took you home, and that was that.”
“He told me he had a friend in social services who he called at the time. She told him I would go to a shelter over the holidays, and since he was willing to look after me, she allowed him to take me home that night.”
“I suppose he might have been talking about Sherry.”
“Sherry?” I asked.
“Sherry Young. She was a nice woman. A friend of both your dad and me. She worked for social services and was the sort of person who really cared about people. I think if your dad had called her and she had no way to process you that night, she would have allowed him to take you home until after the holidays.”
“Maybe I should talk to her.”
“You can’t. Sherry died in a car accident two days after Christmas that same year.”
I frowned. “Car accident? Single car?”
“Yes, she swerved off the road and hit a lamppost. She died due to blunt force trauma to the head.”
Okay, now I was really freaking out. My dad told me a story about finding me in a fire. He’d told me he’d called a friend in social services who’d allowed him to take me home on Christmas Eve rather than taking me to a shelter. She died three days later, so she would have already been dead by the time everyone went back to work after New Year’s. If my dad and Sherry were the only ones who knew he’d taken me in and she died, it would have been easy for him to keep me. But why had a single cop with a commitment phobia made the decision to take on the responsibility for a three-year-old girl? And even more importantly in my mind, had Sherry’s accident been an accident, or had someone caused her to crash and had her death been murder?
Chapter 3
By the time the dogs and I made it back to the cottage, it was time to meet with Jemma, Josie, and Parker. The minute I opened the front door to Jemma and Josie’s cottage, Damon and Stefan attacked me. It seemed my neighbors were huge fans of The Vampire Diaries, so when they named the new kittens in their lives, they’d decided on Damon for the black kitten and Stefan for the orange one.