I Was Done Begging novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Blood Test

The DNA match comes back, her parents arrive, and she asks them for two weeks before her husband finds out; her bags are on the lawn.

The lab sent back one page, and Lucas read it standing at the window of a conference room on the fortieth floor.

He read it twice.

Then he turned around and said, "It's you."

I had been sitting very still for four hours with a paper cup of tea going cold between my hands.

"The probability is higher than the machine can print," he said. "Mr. Everhart is already in the building."

"Now?"

"He was at the airport when I called. He told the pilot to turn the plane."

I put the cup down.

My hands had started to shake, and I didn't want to spill on a stranger's table.

The door opened.

A man of about sixty-five stopped on the threshold with his reading glasses hanging from a cord around his neck.

He was tall and thin, and his silver hair needed cutting.

He looked at my face.

He looked at it for a long time, and his mouth worked.

"Celia," he said.

Nobody had said it like that in my whole life.

Behind him a woman came in with one hand over her mouth.

She was small, with short grey hair and a camel coat buttoned wrong.

She crossed the room faster than a woman her age should have, and she took my face in both her hands.

"My baby," she said. "My baby, my baby."

I remembered the hands.

I had felt them on a warehouse floor in the life I lived while I slept.

I had not known until now that they were real.

I put my head on her shoulder and cried until her coat was wet.

My father stood next to us with his hand on my hair and didn't say a word.

When I could breathe again, my mother opened her purse.

She took out a small velvet pouch and tipped something into my palm.

It was a silver guardian angel medal on a chain.

It was clean and bright, and it was exactly the same as mine.

I turned it over with my thumb.

C.E. 6-14.

"We bought two," she said. "One for you, one for me. The jeweler said you'd never lose it if I wore its twin."

"June fourteenth is your birthday," my father said. "You turned three nine days before they took you."

I had never had a birthday.

The foster system had given me one on a form, in March.

I sat there and held both medals, and I let them tell me I had a day of my own.

My father asked the question when I had stopped crying.

"Where have you been? Who raised you?"

"The state did, mostly."

"And now?"

"I married Julien Lacombe four years ago."

He took off his glasses.

"Lucas told me. The same Lacombe who has been in my office three times this year."

"Yes."

"He sat across from me and asked for money, and all that time my daughter was in his house."

His voice never rose.

It got quieter.

"I want him ruined by morning," he said.

"No," I said.

My mother's head turned.

"Papa, I need two weeks."

The word came out before I thought about it.

He looked at me for a long moment, and I saw the tears in his eyes.

"Two weeks for what?"

"Julien froze my cards before he said a word to me today. His mother and his mistress are in that house right now, waiting to see me crawl."

"Then you will not go back there."

"I have to."

"Celia."

"On the twenty-sixth, the Lacombe Foundation holds its ball," I said. "Everyone will be there. His board, his donors, the press."

"And?"

"I want it to happen in front of them."

I couldn't say what else I knew about that night.

I couldn't tell him that I had already lived it once, and that I had not come out of it walking.

"I want to see exactly what he does when he thinks I'm broke and alone," I said. "Let me be his wife for two more weeks. Let me watch. Then I'll walk in with my real name."

My father looked at my mother.

My mother looked at me.

"You've only just come back," she said, and her voice cracked.

"I'm not going back to him, Mama. I'm going back to finish it."

It was the first time I'd called her that.

She closed her eyes and nodded.

My father put his glasses back on.

"Lucas goes with you," he said. "Every hour of every day. He drives, he's outside, and you carry the phone he gives you."

"That's fine."

"If you tell him to come in, he comes in. If he tells you to leave, you leave."

"Yes, Papa."

He nodded once, and his hand never left my shoulder.

Lucas drove me himself, in a plain grey car, with the new phone in my lap.

It took twenty minutes to reach the Garden District.

He parked half a block from the Lacombe gate and did not turn off the engine.

"I'll be right here."

"I know."

I got out with my cane and walked up to the gate.

I punched in the code I had used for four years.

The pad blinked red.

I tried it again.

Red.

Behind the iron bars, on the lawn, were four suitcases and a garment bag, stacked in a wet pile on the grass.

The curtain in the upstairs window moved.

My mother-in-law stood behind it, watching, and she lifted her hand and waved.

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