Finding Ashley by Danielle Steel (free ebook reader for iphone txt) 📗

records being destroyed. There was nothing I could do after that, so I gave up, and figured I’d never know who she was or anything about her.”

“My sister decided the same thing. She admitted to me recently that giving you up was the worst thing she ever did, and in some ways it ruined her life. Her parents forced her to do it, and she never forgave them for it. I think she called the convent a couple of times, and got the same answer. It was a dead end. I want to help her, so I went there myself a few days ago. It’s an abysmal place. The worst part of it is that they destroyed the records intentionally, and thought they were doing the right thing, to protect everyone’s privacy, and themselves.

“The only reason I got your name is because I came across a woman who was a nun and a midwife there. She left the Church since then, but she remembered that your mother adopted a baby the year that my sister’s baby was born. It was a wild long shot, but I decided to come here to try and find you, and hope we got lucky. It’s a miracle if you’re really my niece. My sister doesn’t know I’m here, she doesn’t know I went to Dublin to go to Saint Blaise’s in person. She told me details recently that she’d never told me before, and I realized that the greatest gift I could give her was to find her daughter. You, hopefully. So here I am. You look remarkably like my mother, and I hope you’re the baby we’ve been looking for.” There were tears in Hattie’s eyes when she said it, and in Michaela’s as she listened to the story. It didn’t come as a shock to her, it came as a relief, and she suddenly had the feeling that she was complete. “And by the way,” Hattie added with a wry grin, “as a further surprise, I’m not a reporter, I’m a nun.”

“You’re a nun?” Michaela looked shocked at first and then she laughed. “You don’t look like a nun, or act like one.”

“But I am. I left my habit at the hotel. My order doesn’t require me to wear it in daily life. And I couldn’t pose as a journalist, and show up in the habit.”

“I guess not.” Michaela grinned.

“Would you be willing to take a DNA test?” Hattie asked her and she nodded, thinking.

“My mother is very open-minded and always encouraged me to find my birth mother if I wanted to. But I don’t want to tell her about this though until we’re sure. I think in some way, it will be a shock to her if what she calls my ‘real’ mother turns up. She’s my real mother and has been all my life. But there’s room in my life for the woman who gave birth to me. I can only imagine the trauma it must have been for a sixteen-year-old girl to have a baby and give it up.”

“I don’t think she ever recovered from it. There’s a sharp side to her. And losing her son nearly finished her off.”

“Where does she live? In New York?” Hattie had said that she lived in New York, so Michaela thought her birth mother might too. “She lives in the Berkshires, in Massachusetts. She has become a recluse since she moved there four years ago, two years after her son’s death. And she’s divorced.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s a very talented writer, she wrote under the name Melissa Stevens. She gave it up when her son got sick, and hasn’t written since, and says she won’t.”

Michaela looked shocked again. “I’ve read her books. They’re brilliant, but very dark and depressing.”

“She’s been through a lot. I’m not going to tell her until we’re sure. I can help provide a sample for the DNA test, if that’s helpful. I think we should keep it between us, until we know. I don’t want to get her hopes up and disappoint her.”

“I want to meet her,” Michaela said, looking earnestly at Hattie, “and for my kids to meet her. I gave up on finding her years ago. It seemed hopeless after they told me about the fire. Why did they want to hide the records? Just to protect everyone’s privacy? My mother never made a secret of adopting me.”

“Others did.” Hattie thought of Heather Jones. She took a deep breath then. “The Church made a lot of money on the adoptions, which they don’t want people to know. They had a booming business with it for a long time. The girls who had their babies there came from families who could afford to send them away, and all of the adopting parents were rich and could pay anything for the babies they adopted. There are plenty of convents who took care of poor girls having babies out of wedlock. But there were a handful of convents in Ireland that turned it into a high-priced, very lucrative business, which some people frown on. It was for the benefit of the Church. My sister and parents, and your adoptive parents, were part of it, and others like them. The nuns were particularly proud of the movie stars who came to them for babies, which is how I learned about your mother, and about you. If she wasn’t a movie star, the ex-nun I talked to wouldn’t have remembered her and I would never have found you, so I guess we’re both lucky. Do you think she’ll be upset?”

“Probably more than she’d expect, at first, but she’ll be gracious about it. She gave me everything I needed, an education at the best schools, nannies to take care of me when she was on location, beautiful homes to live in, vacations in terrific places. I never lacked for anything. She just wasn’t around a lot of the time, but I wasn’t unhappy. It was part of the territory of having a