A Mother's Secret Read Online Free PDF

where hers had begun to bore him. What other explanation was there?
    And then—oh, God, then—she had realized she was pregnant.
    Don’t think about it , she told herself now. What was the point? Daniel had made it clear marriage and family were not in their future. She, in turn, had had to make a decision.
    Abortion wasn’t an option for her. Neither was bringing a child into the world only to hand him off every other weekend—or, God forbid, for half of every week—to a man who hadn’t wanted to have children in the first place. She, of all people, knew the costs of that kind of childhood. She and her sister had paid them.
    No, thank you.
    She would be enough for this baby, she had decided fiercely. And she had been. She was.
    Malcolm was a happy, confident child.
    Rebecca was proud of him at Christmas. He’d ripped into his gifts with glee but he had been just as excited to watch her open his present to her, a pencil jar made of ceramic coils that wobbled and listed their way upward and were glazed a peculiar shade of purplish-brown. He and his preschool classmates had all made them, he told her excitedly.
    “Mine’s really great, isn’t it, Mom?”
    She had laughed and hugged him. Rebecca intended to give this gift a prominent spot on her desk at school. It made her smile every time she saw it.
    Really, none of her doubts had to do with Malcolm. It was only sometimes, when he gave a belly laugh or flushed with pride at how well he was reading or said something peculiar and smart and funny, that she was painfully aware of how much Daniel was missing out on.
    She never let those moments last long. She believed with all her heart that she’d made the right choice for all of them. Even when things had been at their best between them, Daniel was emotionally remote. Imagining his expression if she’d announced that she was pregnant was enough to make Rebecca shudder. She felt fairly certainhe would have seen her pregnancy as a ploy to seize hold of him, just when he was easing away.
    Someday Malcolm might really want to meet his father. It wasn’t as though she intended to carry the secret of his parentage to the grave. But she would not let him be pulled two ways as he was growing up, not the way she and her sister had been, with their parents at constant war.
    Much as she loved living and working in Half Moon Bay, the time might have come to move. It would be smart to avoid any other chance meetings. She could start sending out résumés now, and she and Mal could move this summer. They’d start afresh this coming fall when the school year began, when she wouldn’t be deserting a classroom of children who depended on her, when Malcolm would be leaving preschool behind to enter kindergarten anyway.
    She wouldn’t even have to go that far away, perhaps just down the coast to Monterey or farther south to Santa Barbara. Or somewhere around Tahoe. The winters would be cold, but Malcolm would enjoy learning to ski.
    Yes, Rebecca decided, turning out lights that night and pausing at her son’s bedroom door to see his tousled head on the pillow and his arm firmly clutching Mister, his beloved stuffed lion, a move might be smart.
    Even though Daniel had made no effort to track her down.
     

    “H AVE YOU GIVEN THAT DNA sample yet?” Joe asked.
    Cell phone to his ear, Daniel set down his wineglass and propped his stockinged feet on his coffee table. The phone had rung before he could start cooking dinner. “What’s the hurry? You know it’ll be weeks, maybe months before we get results.”
    “You’re not anxious?”
    “I’d like to know,” he admitted. “But it’s not going to change anything.”
    Actually, he had gone to the clinic, but didn’t want to admit he’d been so eager.
    Not eager, he told himself; he just believed that there was no point in putting off facing what had to be faced. Dealing with it, and moving on. Why procrastinate?
    “This means you have another brother.”
    He’d have liked