Birthright

the driveway.
    She couldn’t do it, she realized. She couldn’t work up the spit for a fight. More, she just couldn’t drag herself back over that old, rocky ground.
    “I can only be pulled in so many directions at once.”
    He stopped the car, sat in the middle of the street until he’d fought back the resentment. He’d promised to help her, he reminded himself. Hell, he’d pushed his help on her. He was hardly doing that if he buried her under his own needs.
    “Let’s do this. We just walked out of the house. Neither one of us said anything yet.”
    Surprise had her asking a simple question. “Why?”
    He reached out, rubbed his knuckles over her cheek. “Because I . . . I care about you. Believe it or not.”
    She wanted to drag off her seat belt, crawl over and into his lap. She wanted his arms around her, and hers around him. But she would never give in to her desires. “Okay, we just got in the car. My first comment is: We didn’t exactly make Hank and Barb’s day, did we?”
    He put the four-wheeler back in drive. “Did you expect to?”
    “I don’t know what I expected. But I know, even though he doesn’t want to believe me, I’ve made another person miserable and worried and guilty. And he gets to bemiserable and worried and guilty over the other patients he recommended Carlyle to. Just in case they’re in the same situation. Then you figure, gee, how many people did those people pass to Carlyle?”
    “I’ve been thinking that would be a vital element of his business. Client word of mouth. Upscale, infertile clients who network with other upscale, infertile clients. You’d even get some repeat customers. All this working, basically, the same base. And you get your product—”
    “Jesus, Graystone. Product?”
    “Think of it that way,” he countered. “He would. You get the product from another pool altogether. Lower- to middle-income. People who can’t afford to hire private investigators. Young working-class parents. Or teenage mothers, that kind of thing. And you’d go outside your borders. He wouldn’t take his product from the Boston area while he worked in Boston.”
    “Don’t pee in your own pool,” she muttered, but she sat up again. “He’d have to have some sort of network himself. Contacts. Most people tend to want infants, right? Besides, older children won’t work. Gotta stick with babies. And you wouldn’t just go wandering around aimlessly hoping to find a baby to snatch. You’d need to target them.”
    “Now you’re thinking.” And the color had come back in her face, he noted. “You’d need information, and you’d want to make sure you were delivering a healthy baby—good product, good customer service, or you’d get complaints instead of kudos.”
    “Hospital contacts. Maternity wards. Doctors, nurses, maybe social services if we’re dealing with unweds and teenagers, or very low-income couples.”
    “And Jessica Cullen was born?”
    “In Washington County Hospital, September 8, 1974.”
    “Might be worth checking some records, finding Suzanne’s OB, maybe jarring her memory some. You’ve got Lana digging for Carlyle. We can dig somewhere else.”
    “Maybe I am still hot for you.”
    “Babe, there was never any doubt. Plenty of motels offthe interstate. I can pull off at one if you really need to jump me.”
    “That’s incredibly generous of you, but I still have a little self-control left. Just drive.”
    “Okay, but you can let me know when that self-control hits bottom.”
    “Oh, you’ll be the first. Graystone?”
    He glanced over, saw her studying him with that considering expression. “Dunbrook?”
    “You don’t piss me off as much as you used to.”
    He caressed her hand. “Give me time.”
    A t seven, Lana was folding laundry. She’d scrubbed the kitchen from top to bottom, had vacuumed every inch of the house and had, to his bitter regret, shampooed the dog. She’d done everything and anything she could think of to keep her mind off what had happened to Ronald Dolan.
    It wasn’t working.
    She’d said terrible things to him, she thought as she balled up a pair of Tyler’s little white socks. She’d thought worse things than she’d said. Over the past fourteen months, she’d done everything in her power to ruin his plans for the fifty acres by Antietam Creek.
    She’d gossiped about him, complained about him and bitched about him.
    Now he was dead.
    Every thought, every deed, every smirk and every word she’d