Free Haunting Olivia by Janelle Taylor

and daughter after I last spoke to you.”
    She shook her head. “My relationship with my father never changed. If anything, it became more nonexistent than it was.”
    “I assume you’re more interested in the ‘undisclosed sum of money’ than in the cottage,” he said.
    “But then again, I thought I knew you once and I found out how wrong I was, so what the hell do I know about you?”
    The slap stung, surprising her. But she cautioned herself against getting too emotional. “Zach, I don’t think either of us knew anything thirteen years ago.
    I think my father lied to both of us. I have no idea what he told you about me. All I know is that he told me my baby was stillborn. The doctor con-firmed it. I believed that my baby was born dead until you said otherwise this morning.” She took a deep breath. “I called my mother when I got back to the cottage, and she swears she was told the same thing. My father was handling the adoption—”
    Zach stared at her. “What adoption?”
    “He browbeat me into agreeing to it. He kept telling me that you abandoned me when I told you I was pregnant and that you took off. That I’d be penniless and living on the street. That I’d be found an unfit and terrible mother by the courts and that my baby would be taken away from me and put into foster care. He told me all this and worse every hour until I signed the papers.”
    Zach stared at her. “But I didn’t abandon you, HAUNTING OLIV IA
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    Olivia. I was told that you ‘wanted nothing to do with a punk like me.’ That when I got you pregnant you realized what a mess I was making of your life. Your father told me he’d put the baby up for adoption or that I could have sole custody. I chose the baby.”
    Olivia gasped. “How could he have done this? Why would he deny me my own child all these years?”
    He stared at her. “Start from the beginning,” he said, finally taking off his coat. “Tell me everything.
    From the moment you found out you were pregnant.
    Don’t leave anything out.”
    The waitress brought their burgers and fries, and Olivia was grateful for the reprieve to prepare herself for telling a story she never allowed herself to think about.
    “Tell me, Olivia,” he said. “I have a right to know everything.”
    She nodded. “I found out I was pregnant a month after I returned home to New York. I called you the day I took the pregnancy test. It was a Sunday morning, and my mother was sleeping. I took the phone into the bathroom, staring at the pink line on the stick of the pregnancy test.”
    “And I immediately suggested we run away together,”
    Zach said.
    Her heart squeezed in her chest. “I know.” She would never, ever forget those words, his first reaction.
    “But my mother overheard part of our conversation and she stormed in and grabbed the phone out of my hand and hung it up.”
    “I’d assumed you hung up on me,” he said, shaking 74
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    his head. “That it was your answer to my idea of running away together.”
    “Zach,” Olivia said, “I loved you. How could you think I’d hang up on you?” She leaned back against her chair and stared up at the ceiling.
    In that month between leaving Maine and learning she was pregnant, she and Zach spoke every day.
    Her mother, curious about the long-distance bill, never asked if it was a boy or girl; all that mattered to her mother was that she’d made a good friend from the wealthy community. She and Zach spoke for just a few minutes every day, but sometimes for as long as twenty minutes, and always about how much they missed each other, how incredible their connection was, how they wished they could just run away together, start over from scratch, but how hard that would be at their age. They would wait until Olivia turned eighteen, and then they’d be together. That was the plan. Neither doubted their love. But then she’d gotten pregnant, and as hard as it would be to run off together and take care of a baby, Zach had