“Hey.”

I jumped when Sebastian entered the room.

“You’re back early,” I said as I put down the photo.

“What were you doing?” he asked.

“I was . . . talking to Amanda. Asking her for guidance. Is that crazy?”

He smiled. “I do it all the time. All the freaking time.”

“Does it ever help?”

“Sometimes I hear her swearing at me, telling me to man up and stop complaining to her.” He chuckled.

“I’m . . . no closer to a decision on what to do. I think I really need to take some time to think about it.”

“Take all the time you need.”

“I think I need to go visit my dad.”

“Does your father know you donated your eggs?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I told him before I was going to do it. He wasn’t exactly thrilled, but he understood. And in the end, he supported my decision.”

“Your dad’s a great guy. Maybe he can help you decide what’s best. I think it’s a good idea to talk to him.”

Nodding, I wiped my eyes. “I’ll probably head out there next weekend.”

He placed a soft kiss on my forehead. “Sounds like a plan. Let’s sit on this until then.”

CHAPTER 29

SADIE

“That’s some crazy story.” My father shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck. I’d just spent a full hour unloading the entire unbelievable tale, from how I’d come to meet the Maxwell family because of Amanda clipping my articles to how they’d received a donated egg. He’d known some of it already, but not the entire crazy thing. Honestly, saying it out loud truly made the whole thing sound like something from a soap opera. It had been a week since Sebastian had told me everything, and it still felt surreal.

“I know. So many things had to happen for everything to wind up where we are today. I mean, let’s say it turns out that I was their egg donor and somehow Amanda found out my information and started keeping tabs on me. Someone was going to be the recipient of my donation, so that’s not even the outlandish part. Though of course I realize the donation itself probably isn’t something that is commonly done. But even if that happened, Birdie still had to find her mom’s clipped articles in the bottom of a box and write to Santa on her own. And then I had to decide to start playing Santa Claus, which eventually led to me being nosy and walking by their house. Birdie had to lose a tiny little butterfly clip on the ground, which I happened to have stumbled across. Not to mention, when I attempted to return it, I was stricken with a sudden case of insanity and decided to pretend to be a dog trainer . . . one who trained in German. And let’s not forget that the actual dog trainer had to coincidentally not show up that day because she happened to have had an emergency on the exact same morning I walked by. And even then, after every one of those crazy chain of events actually did somehow transpire, Sebastian and I still had to fall in love. What are the chances of all those things happening, Dad?”

“You know I’m practical to a fault. I believe most things in life come from our own doing. You don’t find a five-dollar bill on the ground because you’re lucky. You find it because you’re paying attention to your surroundings. But this story here, it’s making me think there’s more to it than that. Your mother was more religious than I am. I believe that if you work hard, you get to put food on the table for your family. While your mother believed God takes care of the people who serve him. I gotta say, sweetheart, right about now, I’m feeling like maybe I should be going to church on Sundays.”

I smiled. “What do I do, Dad? Do I open that envelope?”

“Would it change anything today if you did?”

I thought about it and shook my head. “I love Birdie already, so it won’t change how I feel about her. And I’m not sure it would be the right time to tell her now. You and Mom never hid it from me that I was adopted. I don’t remember a time that I ever didn’t know. So I never felt like one day you pulled the rug out from underneath me by dropping a bomb that you weren’t my biological parents. I always knew who I was, and I would think Birdie would feel like she suddenly didn’t anymore, if that makes any sense.”

Dad nodded. “We struggled to decide how to handle that. But in the end, we felt that the truth always comes out. And often that happens when it’s not a good time for it to appear. We didn’t want you to believe something your entire life and then find out that everything you knew had been a lie. Your mother and I were afraid that could lead to you having trust issues.”

I sighed. “Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, and I’m glad I always knew. But in Birdie’s case, things are a little different. She’s ten years old already. The fact that her mother isn’t her biological mother has been hidden from her for a long time now. So she would feel like her world got turned upside down. And you’re absolutely right, she might not trust anything her dad, or me for that matter, tells her after springing something like this on her. It’s almost like the damage has already been done for ten years. That can’t be changed.”

“When we were debating how to deal with letting you know, we asked the adoption agency for their opinion. You know what the woman said?”

“What?”

“She said if you have to sit down with your child and tell them that they’ve been adopted, you waited too long.”

I blew out a deep breath. “I think you’re right. Since it’s already been kept from her, the focus needs to be on when the best time to come clean is. Is that now or when she’s more mature? Or is it not at all?”

“It sounds to me like you already know the answer to that question.”

I smiled sadly. “Yeah, I guess I do. Thanks, Dad.”

He patted my hand. “There’s something I want to show you. Come with me.”

I followed Dad into his bedroom, and he took an old shoebox down from the top of his closet. He dug around for a minute and then pulled out something. “Here it is. Take a look.”

It was a wrinkled-up piece of paper with one line of script on it. The handwriting I knew was my mother’s. I read it aloud.

“When two people are meant to be together, God makes it happen.”

I looked up, confused. “What is this?”

“You know that I was in the military when your mom and I met. I’d come home on leave and met her. We spent every moment we could together for two weeks, but then I had to fly back to where I was stationed overseas. I still had six months left of my tour.”

“Yeah, I knew that.”

He took the paper from my hand and smiled looking down at it. “We said goodbye the morning I had to ship out. I was crazy about her, but six months is a long time. I was afraid I’d come home and she’d have moved on.” Dad winked at me. “Your mom was quite the catch, especially for an average guy like me. Anyway, we said goodbye, and I spent the next eighteen hours traveling back to base. That night, when I got changed, this here note fell out of my jacket pocket. Your mother had shoved it in there without my knowing about it. I kept it on me every day until I could get back to her.” He paused and then looked up at me. “Then the day we brought you home, your mother was sitting in that rocking chair she loved so much, cradling you in her arms. And I couldn’t stop watching her.”