TWENTY-SIX
Fallon
“Lived too many long days and dark nights without you, sunshine. We’ve got a past that neither one of us can help. But you and I have a say in our future, Augusta Belle. And I swear I’ll spend every day of the rest of my life making it up to you.” I held her fingers at my lips, leaving kisses over every tender spot.
Her eyes softened, hands wrapping around my neck when my palms cupped her thighs and I pulled her up against my waist, back pressed against the smooth bark of a giant magnolia. She locked her ankles around me, arms held so tight I thought she might suffocate me. And still, I didn’t care, not as long as we were together.
“I love you. That never changed, I was just too stubborn to admit it before now. Marry me, Augusta Belle. Please. Make me the happiest motherfucker south of the Mason-Dixon and be my wife.”
Fresh sobs racked her form, a brilliant and toothy smile splitting her gorgeous face before she cried harder against my lips.
“Next town we’re in, we can go anywhere you want and pick out a ring.”
“Shut up.” She held my face in her palms, peppering my lips with kisses. “I don’t need a ring.” She wove her fingertips into my hair, lips whispering against the sensitive skin at my neck. “But I do need something else.”
I slid her down to her feet, soft pink light showering my girl in a radiant golden hue. “Anything.”
“Sure about that?” A slightly scary twinkle lit her eyes for the first time in hours.
Christ, I’d do anything to keep that amused little glimmer in her eyes every day. “What did I just promise to do?”
“Well, first, you have to understand one thing.” She held up a finger. “I didn’t tell you, not because I wanted to hide anything, but because I had to be sure you were ready.”
“Ready?” I arched an eyebrow.
Her grin faltered for an instant before she rested both of her hands on my forearms, pressing her lips together in thought.
“There’s no other way to say this except that… Well, that name my dad left on the note. It kept eating at me, and then I went digging the night before I left to come see you. And I found—” She pulled a little chain from around her neck, a cameo dangling I hadn’t noticed earlier. One I hadn’t seen in more than a decade.
“The necklace I gave you,” I breathed, shocked to see her wearing it now.
“I found it in an envelope, buried in the same folder as the rest of the other stuff about the fire and your dad’. And then there was this letter.” She stopped, eyes haunted. “One letter.”
“A letter?” I wasn’t sure I was ready for the contents.
“And the only thing that was folded inside the letter was this picture.” She slid a wallet-sized picture my way of a chubby, smiling baby, thighs the size of drumsticks and a shock of wild golden hair.
“Christ.” I held the faded picture in trembling hands.
“A boy.”
Silent tears swam in her eyes as she stepped closer, hand at my arm again. “I think it’s him.”
The earth about fell out from under my feet right then.
Him.
Augusta and I had a son.
Our little boy was out there somewhere.
How the fuck hadn’t it occurred to me that we could maybe find him? Meet him?
“Jesus,” I breathed, handing the picture back as my heart clawed its way out of my throat.
“I had these big plans, so much hope when I was at the school that last month. I thought I would raise enough money for the bus fare back to Tennessee and find you, and then we could find him together. I never signed anything, Fallon. I never said they could give our baby up for adoption. They just took him.”
I nodded, processing the overwhelming information cycling through my system.
“One of the nurses finally told me the baby needed that family more than he needed me, and I realized”—she was talking faster now, emotion clogging her words—“she was right. I couldn’t be anything to him. And I heard so many stories of you in Nashville. I knew…well, I knew we would be nothing but trouble for that baby.” She swallowed down more tears. “After I gave birth, the only thing anyone ever said that even acknowledged I’d had a baby was when the nurse finally whispered that the baby had ‘gone to a good and godly family.’”
Her fingers trembled as she worked at the frayed hem of my shirt, distracting herself as she spilled everything she’d been carrying on her slim shoulders.
“So when I finally graduated high school, the counselor lined up a summer internship at Ohio State. They were the only school still accepting applications, and I thought the farther away I was, the easier I could forget. But at night… The nights used to get to me. The girls in my dorm would wake me up throwing pillows because I would just be crying in my sleep. By the end of the semester, they all knew I’d lost a baby, and they all requested to be transferred to a different floor. It was so hard. And not even knowing, not being able to see the sweet little person our baby was growing into…”
“Jesus, Augusta, you think that name your dad had written down might be connected to the people who adopted our boy?”
Wet eyelashes framed her big whiskey eyes as she gazed at me with new intensity. “I don’t think so—I know so.”
“And this is the thing you need? To find him?”
She paused, long, quiet beats more deafening than any sound could be.
A thousand thoughts rushed through my head, knowing every one she’d probably already had. She’d had years to process all of this. I had a lot of catching up to do, but the idea that our kid still might be better off without either of us in his life was at the forefront. Sometimes fate had a way of throwing a person only what they could handle. I liked to believe that most days, but Augusta’s tears had me thinkin’ somethin’ else entirely.
“I have to know,” she finally confessed, arms wrapping around herself before I untangled her, pulling her into my arms for long minutes. My chin resting on her shoulder, I held her as her fingers clutched at my shirt and our minds ran away with us.
“I’ll do anything it takes to make you feel better,” I whispered against her sun-kissed hair.
She didn’t reply for a long time, words caught in her throat before she breathed, “Thank you.”
I nodded, rubbing her back and sensing on a primal level this woman needed to know what happened to the sun and stars that were stolen from her universe so many years ago. I understood she’d carried a burden I would never fully understand, nor could anyone else.
I’d do anything it took to help her find the missing piece.
“So, what’s our first step? Researching that name?”
Augusta Belle pulled away, a soft smile turning up her lips as she wiped at the wetness covering her cheeks. “Well…”
“You’ve already done the research, haven’t you?” I knew her, knew she wouldn’t have been able to let it go once she had a name.
Her face lit for an instant, fingers working the little cameo at her neck back and forth.
“Don’t tell me you found him?”
Her grin grew impossibly wider. “When I Googled that name, the only thing that came up was someone livin’ in Landry, Mississippi.”
My eyebrows shot up, realizing he could still be right here in this state.
“That’s not far from the school I was at, Fallon. I think he’s still right here.”
I pulled her face into my hands, training my eyes on hers, looking…for what I wasn’t sure. “You really think so?”
She nodded quickly, happy smile pulling at her lips.
“I think I found our boy.”