On A Night Like This (Callaways #1)

clear she was holding on tight. She looked like she was about to cry, and her mother was trying to reassure her. She wondered who had taken that photo, and if it was her father who'd made her cry.
    Sighing, she put the picture aside and turned the box upside down, shaking the photos out so she could see all of them at once.
    A very old photo caught her attention. Her parents held a baby in a white baptismal gown. But the baby didn't look like her. In fact, she didn't remember seeing this photo before, and when she was a kid, she'd helped her mother compile many a family photo album.
    Very weird. An uneasy feeling tightened her muscles. She picked up another photograph. This one was more shocking than the last. Her father was at the park. He was pushing a toddler in a swing, and he was smiling at the camera. It was the biggest grin she'd ever seen on his face. It almost didn't even look like him.
    Maybe he had loved her when she was a baby.
    But as her gaze settled on the child, she didn't feel any sense of recognition. The toddler had on blue shorts and a t-shirt with a big dinosaur on it. She'd never worn those clothes. That kid wasn't her. In fact, she was pretty sure it was a boy.
    Her uneasiness deepened. Who was the child? Why was her father with some strange kid at a park? He'd never taken her to the park, pushed her on a swing, or helped her down a slide. She didn't have any cousins. The little boy had to belong to one of her dad's friends.
    She shuffled through more photographs, more pictures of her mom and dad and a baby, then a toddler, that she didn't recognize. But the three of them were always together. They looked like a family—a happy family.
    Where the hell was she ?
    Her stomach turned over. She wanted to take the photos, shove them back into the box, and put it back where she'd found it – in the basement.
    Had her father risked his life to get these pictures?
    With trembling fingers, she rearranged a series of photos, trying to put together a timeline. There was a house she didn't remember, a car that she hadn't seen before. Her parents seemed really young and very happy. These were not the people she'd grown up with. It was as if she had entered an alternate world, one where they existed, and she didn't.
    She turned one of the pictures over. There was a date. The shot had been taken four years before she was born. No wonder she didn't recognize any of the details.
    But who was the child? Her parents had never talked about watching anyone else's son.
    She rifled through more of the pictures, looking for clues. Finally, another date, and this time a name— Stephen, Jr .
    Her heart pounded against her chest. Stephen, Jr .? A child named after her father?
    It didn't make sense. She was the first born, the only child. No one had ever told her about another baby – not her father or her mother or her grandparents. Had they all conspired to keep a secret? Why?
    Something bad must have happened.
    She flew through the rest of the photographs. There were no pictures of the child past the age of three or four, no school pictures, no family shots.
    A million questions raced through her head.
    The analytical part of her brain screamed at her to pay attention to what was right in front of her, to stop trying to pretend that this was some crazy daydream. Her parents had had another child. Maybe it wasn't their birth child. Maybe it was a kid they adopted or cared for while the parent or parents were gone. That thought made her feel marginally better.
    But then she remembered the name, Stephen, Jr .
    Getting up from the bed, she moved over to the desk and opened her computer. She typed in Stephen Davidson, Jr., and ran through the results. Both first and last name were very common, so there were literally hundreds of names. She entered more data, San Francisco, the date on the photograph. Nothing definitive.
    She tried a new search for birth records in San Francisco over a couple years.
    And there it was.
    Stephen Davidson, Jr., father Stephen Davidson, mother Valerie Laura Davidson.
    Sara sat back in her chair, stunned beyond belief. The date was six years before she was born. She'd once asked her mother why they'd waited eight years to have a baby. Her mom had mumbled something about not being ready. But they'd been ready. They'd had a kid together, a child they hadn't told her about.
    Anger and pain ripped through her along with a terrible sense of betrayal. The rush of emotions made her head spin.
    What