Baby In The Making. Elizabeth Bevarly

took another breath and this time when she released it, it was a little less ragged. “Have you heard of a law firm called Tarrant, Fiver and Twigg?” she asked.

      Yeager nodded. “Yeah. They’re pretty high-profile. A lot of old money—big money—clients.”

      “Well, I had a meeting with one of their partners this afternoon.”

      Yeager couldn’t quite hide his surprise that someone like her would be in touch with such a financial powerhouse, though he was obviously trying to. Hannah appreciated his attempt to be polite, but it was unnecessary. She wasn’t bothered by being working class, nor was she ashamed of her upbringing. Even if she didn’t talk freely about her past, she’d never tried to hide it, and she wasn’t apologetic about the way she lived now. She’d done pretty well for herself and lived the best life she could. She was proud of that.

      Still, she replied, “I know. They’re not exactly my social stratum. But I didn’t contact them. They contacted me.”

      “About?” he asked.

      “About the fact that I’m apparently New York’s equivalent to the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia.”

      Now Yeager looked puzzled. So she did her best to explain. Except she ended up not so much explaining as just pouring out her guts into his lap.

      Without naming names, and glossing over many of the details, she told him about her discovery that she’d been born to a family she never knew she had in a town she would have sworn she’d never visited. She told him about her father’s addiction and abuse and about her mother’s custodial kidnapping of her. She told him about their false identities and their move from Scarsdale to Staten Island. She told him about her mother’s death when she was three and her entry into the foster care system, where she’d spent the next fifteen years. And she told him about how, in a matter of minutes today, she went from living the ordinary life of a seamstress to becoming one of those long-lost heirs to a fortune who seemed only to exist in over-the-top fiction.

      Through it all, Yeager said not a word. When she finally paused—not that she was finished talking by a long shot, because there was still so much more to tell him—he only studied her in silence. Then he lifted the glass of wine he had been holding through her entire story and, in one long quaff, drained it.

      And then he grimaced, too. Hard. “That,” he finally said, “was unbelievable.”

      “I know,” Hannah told him. “But it’s all true.”

      He shook his head. “No, I mean the wine. It was unbelievably bad.”

      “Oh.”

      “Your life is... Wow.”

      For a moment he only looked out at her little apartment without speaking. Then he looked at Hannah again.

      And he said, “This isn’t the kind of conversation to be having over unbelievably bad wine.”

      “It isn’t?”

      He shook his head. “No. This is the kind of conversation that needs to be had over extremely good Scotch.”

      “I don’t have any Scotch.” And even if she did, it wouldn’t be extremely good.

      He roused a smile. “Then we’ll just have to go find some, won’t we?”