STILL HOLDING THE PHONE IN HER HAND, TAYLOR BEGAN TO shake, the woman’s words reverberating in her mind. She sank into a kitchen chair, trying to make sense of it all. Her mother was alive? The thoughts were bombarding her faster than she could process them, her emotions ricocheting from utter joy to blinding fury.
Her mother had been alive all these years and never contacted her? She couldn’t conceive of it. A shiver went through her, and she felt her stomach roil. Running into the bathroom, she made it just in time. After she emptied her stomach, she continued to dry heave until her whole body was wrung out. When she’d finally caught her breath, she splashed cold water on her face and returned to the kitchen.
Her phone beeped with a new text from an unknown number and she swiped it open. A blurry picture came through of a woman in her sixties. Taylor enlarged it on the screen and her breath caught. It looked like her mother, only older. Could it really be her? Tears sprang to her eyes and she was choked with emotion. Then she got angry again.
How dare her mother call her out of the blue and demand that she drop everything and fly to her rescue? But as indignant as she felt on the one hand, she knew that was exactly what she was going to do. How could she not? At the very least, she would get an explanation of what had happened all those years ago. And she’d call Jeremy and ask him to go with her—she knew he’d agree. Taylor walked over to the window and looked out at the water, but the view didn’t soothe her. She thought back to the day of her mother’s funeral and being so overwhelmed with grief that she could barely stand. How could her mother allow her to go through all that if it was a lie? Losing her and believing that she’d been murdered had forever changed Taylor. No matter what, she would never allow Evan to suffer that way. There was nothing in this world important enough for Eva to have put Taylor through what she had.
One thing was for sure, whether the woman who she’d just spoken to was Eva or not, she’d given up the right to call herself Taylor’s mother. Because no real mother could ever do that to her child.