Don't Say a Word - Barbara Freethy [70]
"What are you working on?" Julia asked, stalling with trivial conversation. Although she was a bit curious about what Liz was planning to do with the yards of floral fabric spread out in front of her.
"A project," Liz muttered. She stopped sewing and glanced at Julia. "So you finally decided to come home. What's the occasion?"
Julia sighed at the tone of Lizzie's voice. She was tired from her trip, confused about everything she'd learned. She didn't want to fight with Liz, but she had a feeling it was inevitable. "I left you a message that I was staying with a friend," she said.
"Does this friend have a name? Oh, wait, let me guess. Alex Manning."
"We were following a lead. In fact, I have some news to tell you."
"I'm not really interested, Julia. Since it's obvious you don't care what I'm doing, I don't care what you're doing."
Julia pulled out a chair and sat down across from her. "Don't be like that, Liz. Don't make this hard."
"Is that what I'm doing?" Liz asked, hurt in her big brown eyes. "How could I be making your life difficult when I haven't seen you in twenty-four hours? Did you ever consider that my life might have gotten harder when you disappeared and the press had no one to follow but me and Dad?" Liz began to pull the pins out of the fabric, her movements jerky and angry.
"Have they been bothering you?" Julia asked, feeling guilty. "I am sorry, Liz. I thought they'd wait until I surfaced again."
"Where did you go?"
"I went to Buffalo, New York."
Liz's jaw dropped. "You're kidding. You went all the way across the country yesterday and came back today?"
Julia nodded. "I found our grandmother."
Liz stabbed herself with a pin and yelped. She put her finger in her mouth, licking off the drop of blood.
"Are you okay?" Julia asked.
"What did you just say?"
"I found our grandmother, Susan Davidson, the woman I read about in the obituary."
Liz swallowed hard, then sat back in her chair, drawing in a deep breath of air. "I can't believe you went to see her without telling me."
"I wasn't sure you'd support me," Julia replied.
"You're right. I wouldn't have supported you. Dammit, Julia, it's one thing to screw up your own life.
Why do you have to mess up mine, too?" she asked. "I was finally feeling normal after a year of uncertainty, and now you're turning everything upside down."
Julia heard the pain in Liz's voice and wished she could make it better instead of worse. But there didn't seem to be any way to get to the truth about her own life without touching on Liz's life. She had to make Liz understand that there was a positive side. After all, they now had a grandmother they hadn't had before. That was something. She reached for her handbag and pulled out the photos Susan had sent back with her.
Before she showed the photos to Liz, she needed to tell her the rest. "There's something else you have to know. Mrs. Davidson thought that our mother died twenty-five years ago. She was told that Sarah perished in a fire." \ Lizzie's face was a picture of confusion. "I don't get it."
"Mom let her parents believe she was dead." Julia didn't know how else to put it. She and Alex had run through a number of scenarios, including the fact that maybe someone else had intervened, making both Sarah and Susan Davidson believe the relationship was over for different reasons. But who that third person would have been was unexplainable. "I don't know exactly what happened," Julia said as Lizzie remained silent, obviously digesting the news. "Mom said that her parents disowned her. Mrs. Davidson told me that Sarah died in a fire. One of them lied, or someone else lied, but the bottom line is that Mrs. Davidson knew nothing about us or our life with Sarah."
"Stop calling her Sarah. She's Mom," Lizzie complained.
Julia nodded, but she knew that she was starting to think of her mother as Sarah more and more, maybe because it helped delineate the person that her mother was before she'd