A rush of air filled her lungs and froze there. The woman before her disappeared into a sea of black, and the ground leapt up to meet her.
“Grace, wake up. Come on, now.”
Consciousness dawned slowly. The voice that spoke to her was far away. She wasn’t sure where she was. She felt like she was coming out of one of her wild dreams. One of her June Crandall dreams.
“Grace, wake up.”
The bed under her was very hard, though, and scratchy. And who was calling her?
She opened her eyes and found that she was lying on a carpeted floor, under a table, with a metal folding chair towering over her. Someone was patting her cheek. Was it Beth?
Her thoughts were fuzzy, but she was vaguely aware that something significant had happened.
And then she remembered.
The bookstore, her book signing, her…
Oh, my God!
She searched the sea of faces towering over her, and like a homing beacon, her eyes zeroed in on…her mother.
Her breath betrayed her, came in rapid-fire gasps. She tried to stand, but her legs wouldn’t hold her. She stumbled back. Someone caught her.
She was aware of a strident voice nearby. “Who the hell do you think you are? Do you know what this poor girl has been through in her life? Who are you to come in here—”
Grace raised her arm. “No, it’s okay.” She stood on colt-like legs and faced the woman she’d dreamed about so often, so long ago. The woman she’d longed to meet her entire life. A longing so old and so powerful it felt like it was built into her bones.
Grace reached out to touch the familiar face, older now but still recognizable from the sketches in her trunk at home.
“Is it really you?” Her voice was a whisper.
The woman nodded through her tears.
Grace stared at her, examining her as though she were looking at the fine details of a painting, or a sketch. This was her mother, of that she was sure.
She blacked out again.
This time she came to in a chair. It only took her a second to recognize the setting—the bookstore owner’s office. Beth and the store manager clustered around her. There, on a smaller chair at her knee, was June Crandall.
Still not a dream.
“Please,” she said to the others, “would you leave us alone?”
“You’re sure?” Beth said. “Do you want me to call Antonio?”
“No, please don’t call Antonio. He has a late client meeting and he’d just worry. You can leave us alone. I’m all right.”
When it was just the two of them, June who spoke first. “I know how much of a shock this must be. It is to me, too. You must have a lot of questions. So do I. Maybe we should…would you like to come to my apartment to talk?”
Grace studied the woman before her. This just couldn’t be. Or could it? She had dreamed about her, had been so certain that June Crandall was her mother, but her birth certificate told a different story. She wanted so badly to believe it was true, but it just seemed so…impossible.
So, yes, she did have a lot of questions. She found herself nodding, agreeing to meet the woman. To meet…her mother? Numbly, she accepted the piece of paper with the woman’s address on it, and somehow managed to tell her she would see her soon. She stood on unsteady legs, shuffled to the door and held it open.
The woman stood to leave, but before she did, she turned to face her. “They told me you were dead, Grace. That you died at birth. I want you to know, more than anything else, that I would never in a million years have given you up. I loved you more than life itself, and I’ve never stopped.”
Grace’s heart tripped over the words and she fell into June’s arms. That question, more than any other, was the one she’d needed answered. It was what she’d always believed, deep in her heart. But was it true? Could all of this really be happening? She drew back and stared at the woman again, just to be sure it was real. It was.
Closing the door behind June, Grace sat alone in the office of the bookstore, trying to absorb what had just happened. If the woman hadn’t resembled her sketches so closely, she would’ve thought her to be some crackpot, out to make a buck on the book somehow. But in her heart, she knew that the woman was who she said she was. She didn’t know how the woman had found her, or where she’d been for the past twenty-seven years, but she had time to figure all that out.
They told me you were dead.
Grace went to the ladies’ room and splashed cold water on her face. Then she picked up her cell phone and dialed Antonio, but changed her mind and snapped the phone shut. He was probably still in his client meeting anyway, and she wanted to do this alone. She would tell him about it after the meeting.
She shrugged into her coat, and despite Beth’s plea to take someone with her just in case, she left the store and hailed a cab.
The driver pulled up in front of the woman’s building. She paid him, stepped out of the cab then stood, rooted to the ground, wanting nothing more than to rush up the stairs and into her mother’s arms once again. But something held her back.
What if it was all a mistake? Or a dream that she would wake up from the minute her mother answered the door? She pinched herself and it hurt, so she put one foot forward and climbed the steps.
When she reached the top, she rang the bell and waited. Her heart felt as though it were sprinting down the street without her. She reached to press the bell again just as the door was pulled open.
Relief swept through her when she saw June’s face. It hadn’t been a dream. It was real. She smiled and immediately saw her smile reflected back to her on the woman’s face. She stepped inside, peeled off the layers of warm clothes she wore, and placed them in her mother’s extended arms.
June took her hand and led her into the living room, where she’d set out some tea and cookies. Grace sat on one of the throw pillows on the floor and leaned against the sofa. June did the same. Without asking, June poured them both some tea, and for a long moment they sat there, taking each other in.
It was Grace who broke the silence. “Is this really happening? Are you really my mother?”
June stared at her with moisture rimmed lashes and smiled. “It is and I am.”
“How did you find me?”
“From your book.”
Grace pursed her lips. “I don’t understand. I mean yes, the book is about a woman named June Crandall, but how did you know it was about you?”
“I didn’t, at least not until I got to the end.” June reached over and withdrew a document from a folder that was sitting on the coffee table.
Grace took the document and looked it over. It was a birth certificate. June’s apparently. She scanned through the various details—hospital, attending physician, witnesses—and then it jumped out at her. June’s father’s name was Edward Crandall, and her mother’s name—
“Your mother’s name was Elena Borgese?” It was one of the few details she hadn’t changed in the book.
“That’s how I knew you were my daughter. I’m still not sure how all the pieces fit together, but when I saw you, I knew without a doubt that you were mine.”
“What was it about me that made you know for sure?”
“You look just like your father.”
Grace could not contain her smile. “My father? Really? But my birth certificate said that my father was unknown.”
“It’s a lie, Grace. Your father’s name was Guillermo Torres. I called him Will.”
Wow, she hadn’t even considered it, but it turned out she had two parents. But wait…
“Was?”
Pain filled her mother’s eyes at the mention of her father.
Grace took June’s hand. “If it’s too painful, you don’t need to talk about it.”
June took a deep breath. “No, it’s okay. You deserve to know about your father. He was a good man…boy, actually. He was just a boy when we met, and I was just a young, starry-eyed girl.”
Grace laughed. “Was it love at first sight?”
June smiled and nodded. “Oh, yes. Was it ever.”
Grace nodded encouragingly, hoping she would go on.
“I loved reading romance novels back then,” June said. “I was a young, foolish girl in search of love. My mother died when I was just eight. She and my father had been madly in love. I wanted to experience that kind of love, so I lost myself in books. You see, when I read a good romance novel, I’d fancy myself the beautiful heroine waiting to be rescued by her handsome prince. One day, I was sitting out by the pool reading a particularly juicy book and…”