Chapter 2 - Whose Child Is ThisHe'd loved Elena Marchetti when he was twenty-three years old and utterly certain that love was the only thing in the world that mattered more than his family's business. She'd worked at the diner near the old rail yard, waited tables through community college, laughed easily and often, and had absolutely no idea, when they met, that his last name meant anything in that town.
She found out eventually. Everyone always did.
His mother, Marguerite Calloway, had found out considerably faster.
Weston remembered the shouting matches, the ultimatums, the summer his mother had spent systematically making it clear that Elena Marchetti would never be welcome at a Calloway dinner table, in a Calloway wedding, or anywhere near a Calloway name on a birth certificate. And then, one October morning twenty-six years ago, Elena had simply been gone. No note. No goodbye. Her landlord said she'd left in the middle of the night, paid up through the end of the month, no forwarding address.
Weston had spent two years trying to find her before he finally stopped. He told himself she'd left because she didn't love him enough to fight for it. He built a life around that story, married someone else eventually, divorced her nine years later, built the company bigger, made himself busy enough that the shape of the question — why did she really leave — stopped being something he let himself look at directly.
Now she was standing on the shoulder of Route 9 pulling a mattress on a wagon, and there was a little girl gripping the back of her shirt, staring up at Weston with open, unguarded curiosity the way only very young children can look at strangers.
"Are you all right?" he asked. It was a stupid question. Nothing about the scene in front of him suggested she was all right. "Can I help you with that?"
"We're fine."
"Elena, there's nothing out here for miles. Where are you walking to?"
She hesitated, and in the hesitation he saw exactly how not fine she was. "The Hendersons' old place. About two more miles. They said we could stay in the barn until I sort something out."
"Let me drive you."
"I don't need—"
"Please." He said it quietly, and something in his voice must have reached the part of her that remembered him from twenty-six years ago, because her shoulders dropped half an inch and she nodded.
That was when the little girl, tired of being ignored, tugged on Elena's shirt and said, "Up," in the universal toddler demand for attention, and Elena bent down to lift her onto her hip.
The girl turned her face toward Weston, curious about the stranger, and looked directly at him.
May you like
Her eyes were pale gray-green. The exact color of his mother's eyes. The exact color of his grandfather's eyes in the portrait that hung in the Calloway Freight boardroom. The exact color, Weston realized with a slow, cold drop in his stomach, of his own eyes, which he'd inherited from four generations of Calloways going back to the man who founded the company.
"Elena," he said, and his voice had changed completely. "Whose child is this?"
Related Stories
