Harlequin Intrigue February 2020--Box Set 1 of 2 by Debra Webb

Author:Debra Webb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Peyton clutched the cell phone in her hand as she stared at the papers and photo albums covering the top of her father’s dining room table. She had to make the call. She would make the call. But not yet. She needed a few more minutes alone with the horror that her life had become before she shared this latest batch of awful family secrets. Especially since the person she was going to share them with was the one person whose opinion of her and her family mattered—Colin.

Her hand shook as she straightened one of the stacks of medical bills before lowering herself to perch on an olive-green cushioned chair. In the week since her father’s memorial service, she’d sorted through all of his belongings, setting aside items to donate to charity and others to be thrown out. And this, a handful of photo albums and several stacks of bills and paperwork, had painted a picture she’d never imagined she would see, even in her worst nightmares.

When she’d helped her father sort through her mother’s things months earlier, he’d insisted on being the one to go up in the attic to bring down the boxes. Now she knew why. He hadn’t wanted her to see these particular boxes. Because they contained bills and letters and photographs that laid bare a family history that would shred what little was left of the one thing that her father treasured above all else—the Sterling reputation.

Her hand started to ache and she realized she was gripping the phone too tightly. She set the phone down on the edge of the table, then slowly flipped through an old photo album that documented her mother’s life from the time she was a child through the first years of her marriage to Peyton’s father. The cardboard backing was brittle, the time-yellowed protective plastic covers crinkling each time she turned a page.

The baby pictures had been shocking enough, because Peyton and Brian had been told that there weren’t any baby pictures of their mother, that she’d been an orphan, raised in foster care, and didn’t have any knowledge of her birth family. Judging by the smiling faces of the many relatives surrounding baby Molly, that had been a lie.

Later pictures showed her mother with the same people, who were taking the happy toddler to a fair to ride ponies, pushing her on a swing at the park. She grew up on the pages in front of Peyton, learning to ride a bike, starting elementary school, holding up her fifth-grade report card while holding her nose, as if laughing at the bad grades she’d made. The transition from happy smiling baby to morose teenager in the second half of the album was startling to see. It reminded her so much of Brian that her heart ached.

The next-to-last page showed a two-story brick house with acres of rolling green hills behind it. No mountains, so it wasn’t near Gatlinburg. Dozens of smiling, well-dressed people Peyton recognized from throughout the album—her mother’s family—posed in front of the house.

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