“Clean yourself up, Gerald,”
she said, not unkindly.
“You have a lot of work ahead of you.”
One week after the engagement party, I drove to Springfield, Massachusetts. The house was a modest colonial in a quiet suburb, white siding, blue shutters, a garden of wild flowers that had clearly been someone’s labor of love. A far cry from my grandmother’s estate or Gerald’s tutor mansion, but warm in a way those houses had never quite managed.
Linda Morrison answered the door before I could knock. She was 56 years old, with blonde hair streaked with silver and blue eyes that were an exact mirror of my own. Looking at her was like looking into a time machine. This was who I would become in 30 years.
“Tori.”
Her voice caught on my name.
“I’ve been staring at your picture all week. I kept thinking… I kept thinking I was dreaming.”
She pulled me into a hug that smelled like lavender and something else I couldn’t identify. Something that felt impossibly like home.
We sat in her kitchen for four hours. She showed me photographs of her childhood, of my biological grandparents who had passed away years ago, of the life I might have had if a traininee nurse hadn’t made a mistake. She told me about her ex-husband, David, my biological father, who had died of cancer three years ago, never knowing that Rachel wasn’t his.
“He used to joke that Rachel had old soul eyes,”
Linda said, wiping her tears with a kitchen towel.
For Complete Cooking STEPS Please Head On Over To Next Page Or Open button (>) and don’t forget to SHARE with your Facebook friends.
