Hidden Pleasures - Brenda Jackson [54]
Brittany had decided if she didn’t find anything to give her a clue as to why her mother had decided to look for her all these years, then she would go talk to the private investigator she’d hired. Maybe the man could shed light on a few things.
She pulled out another drawer, thinking like the others she would find more pictures, and was surprised to find a journal. Her heart rate increased as she pulled out the journal and closed the drawer. It was thick and she could tell it contained many entries.
Moving quickly to her mother’s bed, Brittany kicked off her shoes before lying down on the bed. One of the first things she’d done when she arrived this morning was strip the bed and put on fresh linen. The washer and dryer were going and she intended to have the sheets back in the linen closet before she left. It was still early yet, not quite four o’clock. More than likely Galen was working and hadn’t noticed the time.
The first entry she came to was written eighteen years ago on January tenth. Brittany’s tenth birthday.
I tried to bring up the subject of the baby I gave away, my beautiful little girl, but Walter doesn’t want to talk about it. He’d said he could handle it when I first told him about her last year, but now I’m not sure I did the right thing.
Brittany quickly sat up. Her mother had told her husband about her? Quickly she scanned ahead to another entry, recorded on her thirteenth birthday.
Today my daughter becomes a teenager. I hope the family that adopted her loves her as much as I do. It was so hard for me to give her up, but I wasn’t given a choice. I couldn’t abort her like Mom and Dad wanted. Especially after Britton drowned. She was to be our baby. Britton and I had so many plans, and when he died he left me all alone.
Brittany’s heart jumped. Her father’s name had been Britton and he’d drowned. A knot formed in her throat when she kept reading.
I cried for days and Mom and Dad refused to speak to me for months, but I wouldn’t back down about the abortion. They finally sent me away to Phoenix to live with Uncle Milton and Aunt Pauline. I agreed to give my baby up for adoption since everyone said she would go to a couple who wanted a baby but couldn’t have one. They would love and cherish my baby like I would have done. When I met with the people at the adoption agency a month before my due date, I thought they were nice, and they said I could even name the baby. I decided to name him Britton if he was a boy and Brittany if she was a girl. She was a girl so I named her Brittany. I got to hold her for only a little while and I thought she looked like Britton. She was a beautiful little girl with a head full of curly black hair. I noticed two of her fingers were crooked and her feet were turned in but the nurse said they would eventually straighten out. Happy Birthday, Brittany, wherever you are. I hope you’re happy.
Brittany wiped a tear from her eye. She hadn’t been happy. While her mother assumed she was somewhere being loved and cherished by some nice couple on her thirteenth birthday, it had been just weeks after that when Mr. Ponder had tried to molest her. And those fingers never changed, and as a child she had to wear heavy metal braces that fit into her shoes until her bones straightened out. Both birth defects made her a flawed baby nobody wanted to adopt.
Brittany looked down at her hand. All her fingers were straight now because one of the first things she’d done after making a profit at Etiquette Matters was to have surgery on her fingers.
She drew in a deep breath and continued reading. Seconds turned into minutes and minutes into hours. The entries came to an end and Brittany was so full of her mother’s love that she couldn’t stop the tears that poured from her eyes. All those years when she thought nobody loved her, nobody cared, here in this house located thousands of miles from where she lived