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  “He has no idea.” Sam gave the girls a thumbs-up from the driver’s seat and waited while the others found their places. “This is going to be fun.”

  “I almost lost it a few times.” Erin buckled herself into the passenger seat and looked back at the girls. She waggled her finger at them. “You four couldn’t stop laughing. I still don’t know how I got through the conversation.”

  “It was so funny,” Heidi Jo clapped her hands. She and Amy Elizabeth sat together in the middle seat with Clarissa and Chloe in the back, their usual seats. “You were telling Papa we wish we could be there and the whole time we were packing the car.”

  “I thought for sure he’d hear us laughing,” Clarissa shook her head. “Mom, I was like, so loud.”

  “It wasn’t just you!” Erin laughed again. “Your sisters were laughing, too. I guarantee he heard us. That’s why I had to tell him you were cleaning.”

  “Which, by the way, did you girls have time to clean?”

  Erin was still turned around, looking at their girls. Chloe winced. “It’s better than last night.”

  “Ours is clean, Mommy.” Heidi Jo smiled, her brown eyes taking up what looked like half her face. “I promise.”

  “Yeah, but Mom helps you.” Chloe tapped her younger sister lightly on the head a few times. “Don’t forget that.”

  Again they laughed, all of them despite the lack of sleep and the long drive ahead.

  “Okay, are we ready?” Sam looked back at the girls and then at Erin.

  Only then did she gasp. “The computer. I forgot to turn it off.”

  “You don’t have to turn it off, babe.” Sam raised his eyebrow. “I’m an IT guy, remember?”

  “Yeah, but I want to. We might get lightning this week.” She opened the door and hurried out. “I’ll be right back.”

  Sam pointed to the front door. “Hurry.”

  She ran three steps toward the house and then turned around and flew back to the car. “I need the keys. Please.” Her words ran together as she held out her hand.

  Sam laughed as he killed the engine and handed her the key ring. “Still hurry.”

  “Yes.” She flashed Sam a nervous look and darted toward the house. “Sorry. I’ll be right back.”

  Inside, Erin ran to the computer. She was about to shut it down when she saw the private Facebook message. Facebook was the last page she had opened late yesterday, looking to see if Ashley had sent out more details about the surprise party.

  But her sister had waited until this morning. Finally, she thought to herself. If there were details she needed, better now than not at all. She clicked the icon and her private messages opened up on a new page. As they did, Erin felt the blood leave her face. The new message wasn’t from Ashley.

  It was from Candy Burns.

  Erin felt suddenly sick. Her eyes raced over the message once and then a second time. But something strange and unexpected happened as she read Candy’s message a third time. Erin’s horror turned to hope. The message said this:

  Dear Erin, as you know I’m out of prison and I’m a changed woman. I really do think I’d make a good mother now. But I’m also open to a deal. My expenses are very high and I don’t have a job. If the deal is right, I’m sure I could move on, start a new life, if you know what I mean. In the right situation, I could have other kids. I hate to mess up your happy family. Let me know your thoughts. Candy B.

  Erin sat back hard in the computer chair. This was it! The proof she needed. The hope inside her built until she laughed out loud. The woman must’ve been back on crack to write those words, to incriminate herself.

  She didn’t have time to copy and paste the message into a text for Naomi, the girls’ social worker. So she decided to take care of it from the road. Her phone had a Facebook app, even though she had never used it. Either that or the matter could wait until they got back from Indiana.

  With a few quick clicks Erin shut down the computer and hurried back out to the car. Sam grinned at her as she took her seat. “Ready for lightning?”

  “Ready.” She would tell him about Candy’s message later. For now she turned and gave the girls a thumbs-up. “Ready for Mandisa?”

  “Yes!” All four of them shouted the word at once, and then they all fell into another round of laughter.

  She slipped in the CD and, as the music played and the girls sang out loud, Erin couldn’t get Candy’s message out of her mind. While Sam drove through town and as he got onto the highway, she couldn’t stop thinking about the woman’s words, the clear extortion once again hinted at between the words. Yes, some women could find rehabilitation and redemption in prison, some could go on to be wonderful mothers, Erin had no doubt.

  But she had met Candy in person, and the cold indifference the woman had felt about her daughters back then was not something that could be easily changed through a program or a class. Only an act of God could’ve turned Candy into a redeemed woman. And from what Naomi had said, “religion wasn’t part of Candy’s progress in prison.”

  Even Naomi doubted Candy’s intentions — because of things she’d said in a number of conversations. But still Naomi had no choice but to recommend the visits because there was no actual proof that Candy’s motives were suspect.

  Until now.

  Suddenly Erin couldn’t keep the information to herself another minute. She wasn’t sure how to use the Facebook app, so she pulled out her phone and called up Naomi’s contact information. Then she tapped out a text.

  Look, something urgent has come up. I can prove to you that Candy only wants money out of this. I’ll call you when we get back to Texas. This can wait until then.

  There were times when Erin had mixed feelings about taking a trip back to Bloomington, times when she hadn’t been sure about the way her siblings felt about her, and whether they even cared if she and her family were part of the get-together. But she felt nothing like that this time. This might even be the best reunion they’d ever had.

  As if God Himself agreed with her, Erin called up her Bible Promise app and the verse for today was Psalm 13:6. She read it silently with an even greater hope than before. I will sing the Lord’s praise, for He has been good to me. Indeed, Erin planned to sing with her family all the way to Bloomington. Because yes, the Lord had been good to them. So very good. The fifth song on the album was starting.

  “Mom, can you turn it up a little?” The question came from Clarissa.

  Erin gave Sam a questioning look. “Is that okay?”

  He winked at her. “You can play it as loud as you want.” He looked in the rearview mirror. “As long as everyone sings.” He turned up the volume as the music started to play. “This is my favorite kind of concert.”

  And like that they were all singing and Erin pushed away thoughts of Candy. They would drive halfway today and finish tomorrow. Ashley had asked them to be at her house by five o’clock, since their dad was supposed to be there at five thirty. She smiled as she leaned back into her seat and faced the road ahead.

  It would be the greatest surprise ever.

  Eight

  DAYNE CHECKED HIS WATCH AS HE HEADED DOWN THE STAIRS OF their Malibu home. Ten a.m. Still plenty of time for a walk with Katy. He hurried around the corner and into the kitchen. The kids had been up at six, and just now Dayne had tucked them in for a quick nap. They’d need it, since they wouldn’t likely sleep on the flight to Indiana later that afternoon.

  Once Sophie and Egan were down for their naps, Dayne found his wife and her aunt in the dining room having coffee.

  “Foggy morning.” He peered out the patio door at the beach. “Typical for this time of year.”

  “It’s still beautiful. In fact, I was just saying I might never leave.” Peggy Wayne was ten years younger than Katy’s mother — who had passed away a few years ago from complications of diabetes. Katy hadn’t been very close to her aunt, but her mother’s funeral had stirred new interest in the family. Aunt Peggy had been out to see them twice in the past
year — a blessing for all of them.

  “When you’re finished … could we take a walk?”

  “Sure.” Katy’s look told him she knew he had a lot on his mind. She took a final sip of her coffee. “I was done. Just chatting.” Katy stood and kissed her aunt on the cheek. “You’ll listen for the kids?”

  “Yes, yes.” She waved her hand, shooing Katy away. “You two go run off. If I lived on a beach I’d only be inside to eat and sleep.”

  Dayne smiled. The woman was refreshing, a spunky grandmotherly type and someone he believed would be part of his family for all time. He and Katy grabbed hats and headed down their back stairs. With the fog, the shoreline was nearly empty.

  They walked across the sand to the shore and Dayne put his arm around her shoulders. “I like her.”

  “Me, too.” Katy grinned at him. “I think she’s adopted us. With her never having married, we’re sort of the only family she has.” For a few seconds she was quiet. “I guess if anyone knows about finding family later in life it’s you.”

  Dayne squinted at the gray horizon. “I’ve put off writing that letter. This morning it’s all I can think about.”

  “I wondered if you found time.”

  “I had time. I guess I couldn’t figure out how to put my feelings on paper.” He looked at her and slowed his pace. “The fact that he’s turning seventy. It makes me realize how many years I missed.”

  “Hmm.” Katy looked straight ahead, as if she were seeing images from the past same as he’d been seeing them all day. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

  “It’s why I wanted to walk.” He tightened his hold on her, loving the way her body fit against his. “I thought maybe if I talked about the last ten years I’d find a way to write about it.” He was quiet for several steps, the morning sand cool on his feet. “It’s still hard to believe. How we found each other.”

  Katy slipped her arm around his waist. “If you hadn’t found the Baxter family, you wouldn’t have found me.”

  “Exactly.” They were closer to the surf now and they kept their steps slow and measured. As if the winds of yesterday were too strong to walk quickly against.

  “Why don’t you tell me the story again, how you found out you were adopted.” She smiled at him. “It’s been a while.”

  He stopped for a moment and kissed her lips, a kiss marked with deep passion and a grateful kind of love. She always knew exactly what he needed. Even now. “Okay.” He let the story line up in his heart once more. “Of course, I didn’t know I was adopted until after my first parents died. You remember that, right?”

  “I do.” She seemed in no hurry. “I guess I want to hear your feelings on all of it. Pretend like you’ve never told me before.”

  They started walking again and Dayne breathed in the wet salty air. She was right. The only way to tell the story was to start at the beginning. He told her again how his parents had adopted him but then moved him to Indonesia to preach the gospel. Dayne was raised in a boarding school for missionary kids, a fact he resented with every passing hour when he was a kid. “I felt like I was competing with God. Like He was my enemy and I was losing.” He lowered his gaze to the sand for a few seconds. “I fought for my parents’ time right up until the moment they were killed.”

  The plane crash happened without warning; the small Cessna dropped from the sky and broke apart in a ball of fire on the jungle floor. Rescue workers found very little of his parents’ remains. At the time, Dayne was eighteen without siblings or any family. A small settlement from his parents’ estate allowed him to enroll at UCLA and move to Los Angeles — as far from his parents’ mission field as possible. He moved into a dorm and in the first few weeks he found a talent agent. Before he’d been in town a month, he had a decent part in a movie.

  A year later he landed the lead role in a film that broke records at box offices, and like that Dayne Matthews was a household name. The next Brad Pitt, people called him. He was wanted by every casting agent and desired by every woman in Hollywood. Early on, the fame and wealth led to wild nights and crazy opportunities, choices Dayne embraced despite everything his parents and his upbringing had taught him.

  “I thought I was still battling God, only this time … this time I was going to win.” The memories of those days made his stomach hurt. “I was such a mess.”

  “You were out of control, no doubt.” Katy’s look told him she felt sorry for him. “I’m sorry you had to go through that. Everyone thought you’d have a tragic ending—like so many celebrities.”

  “I lived life one party to the next. If I hadn’t found you …” He let his voice trail off. “I don’t know if I’d be here.”

  Katy stared out at the ocean, the past clearly weighing on her, too. She had been running Christian Kids Theater back then, living in Bloomington and content to stay there. She stopped and looked at him. “Back then never in a million years would I have believed we’d meet, let alone wind up like this.” She put her arms around his neck and kissed him, clinging to him in a way that soothed his doubts. However broken his past, God had used the heartache to bring him to her.

  “One morning — I don’t really remember why — I went to my parents’ storage unit.” Dayne had rented the space to hold their belongings after the crash. “I looked through the boxes — almost as if I wanted some kind of hint, some way to understand myself.”

  There, in a dusty old box, he found a picture of a beautiful brunette, an old photo cracked and faded by the years. Dayne had stared at the picture for a long while, trying to figure out who the woman was and why her picture was stuck inside a box of her mother’s things. After a minute he shrugged and set the framed photo back in the box and moved on to his parents’ other belongings.

  “And a few weeks later you were in your lawyer’s office and you saw Luke?”

  “Yes. But I didn’t see him first. But in the first ten minutes three people told me I looked like this Luke Baxter.” By then Luke had worked at the LA office for a while and he’d been hearing how much he looked like Dayne. He ran his fingers down Katy’s shoulders. “No one actually meant that it was possible. Me and Luke Baxter? Related? It was too crazy even to suggest.”

  But one afternoon Dayne was meeting with Luke in his office when for a moment the young lawyer had to step out and take a phone call. In his absence Dayne glanced at the framed pictures on Luke’s desk. One showed an extended family, what looked like a host of siblings and their spouses along with a bevy of children and an older couple. But the other picture was far more dated. It showed a young man and woman, maybe in their early twenties.

  “I gasped out loud, because I knew.” Dayne walked a little slower, the memories strong. “The woman was the same one I’d seen in the box of my mother’s things. I was positive.”

  “What did you think?” Katy still looked surprised, as if she were only hearing the story for the first time.

  “I didn’t think I was adopted. I had no idea about that. I wondered if maybe the woman was a friend of my mom’s, somehow. I couldn’t wait to get back to the storage unit.”

  When he did, he took the photo from the frame and looked at the back. The message written there rocked Dayne’s world. After that he could only surmise that somehow his parents hadn’t told him the truth and that maybe — just maybe — he was adopted. But that quickly led him to the next obvious possibility. If he was adopted and the guy at the law firm looked just like him … and if the lawyer had a framed picture of a woman who seemed to possibly be Dayne’s birth mother, then didn’t that mean —

  “It sort of hit me all at once, like being pulled into a riptide. Fighting it would only make it more impossible to find my way back to the shore.”

  “Aww, sweetheart.” She stopped and faced him, searching his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” He pulled her into a close hug and for a long moment they swayed. “I didn’t have anyone I could be angry at, but I didn’t have God, either. No real way to navigate my fee
lings or make sense of them. My parents should have told me.”

  She eased back and put her hand gently alongside his face. “I was praying for you.”

  “You didn’t know me.” Gradually the meaning in her words dawned on him. “Wow … you’re right.”

  “Yep.” She kissed him again, more lightly this time. “I prayed for the guy I would marry.” She raised her brow, her eyes bright with a sweet sort of teasing. “I had no idea I was praying for the Dayne Matthews. I probably would’ve prayed harder.”

  They both laughed at that. Dayne took her hand and they headed north along the beach again. “But still,” her tone grew more serious, “I was praying. It’s amazing to think how God was answering those prayers when neither of us even knew it.”

  “It makes sense.” He chuckled, the miracle of his life fully alive inside him the way it hadn’t been for a long time. “I mean, how else could I explain what happened after that?”

  Katy smiled, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. They both knew the next part of his story. Dayne lifted his face to the foggy sky. He needed this, a chance to realize the gift God had given him when he saw his mother’s photo in the law firm that afternoon. The timing had been so completely divine.

  Once Dayne read the back of the photo he did the only thing he knew to do. He was Dayne Matthews, so he could hardly call up Luke Baxter and tell him he suspected they might be brothers. What if the guy went to the press or demanded money? Anything was possible. Instead he hired a private investigator and gave him simple instructions. Find out everything about the Baxters, and, most of all, find out if the mother had given up a baby boy when she was younger.

  The news came back more quickly than Dayne expected, but it wasn’t all good. Yes, Elizabeth Baxter was his biological mother, and her husband, John, was his birth father. The family was good and true and wholesome, raised in a strong faith and with a strong love for each other. The sort of family Dayne had longed for all his life.