Page 36 of The Followers

His eyes cut away from hers, focusing somewhere out on the lawn. A muscle in his jaw twitched. Anxiety threaded through her limbs, but she forced herself to continue. “I can’t think of any reason why you would have those. Any good reason, I mean. But we promised we would be honest with each other, which is why I wanted to come clean with you. And give you a chance to explain.”

He blew out a slow rush of air, then leaned forward and pressed his hands together, palms in, like a prayer. “You want to know why I have those birth certificates?”

“Yes.”

“I was never married to Ella’s mother.”

It was the last thing she’d expected him to say, and she blinked in surprise. “You weren’t? Why would you make something like that up?”

“I didn’t. Well, not on purpose. A couple years ago, Ella got interested in weddings—stuff she saw on TV, I guess—and started pestering me about my wedding to her mother. I said something to get her to stop asking about it, and ever since, that’s the story I ran with. I didn’t want to tell her the truth, which was that I hardly knew her mother.”

Molly blinked again. “You hardly knew her? But you had a baby together.”

“We met at a party—I was a senior at Ohio State, and she worked at a department store in town. It wasn’t serious, and she ended it a couple weeks later. I didn’t hear from her until she called and said she was pregnant.”

“With Ella.”

He nodded. “She said the baby was mine, but I wasn’t sure.”

Molly’s image of a young and earnest Scott, marrying his sweetheart right out of college, shifted in her mind. She imagined him cocky and handsome, hooking up with Ella’s mother, getting her pregnant, then not believing her when she approached him.

“But you had slept with her.”

“Yes.”

“Without protection.”

He glanced at her face. “Yes, Molly. I was twenty-two. Did you never do anything stupid when you were young?”

She cringed; of course she had. “I’m sorry. Go on.”

“Well, I didn’t react the way I should have. When I asked her how she knew the baby was mine, she got upset and told me she didn’t want to see me. I didn’t hear from her again until she was in the hospital, after Ella was born.”

“That’s the picture on Ella’s nightstand, then?” Molly recalled the awkwardness in the picture. She’d attributed it to the difficulty of adjusting to a newborn. No, it was because Scott and Ella’s mother hardly knew each other.

He nodded. “That’s why I didn’t want Ella to have it in her room. It was the strangest day of my life—I had a baby, all of a sudden. But I decided that I would do the right thing and help take care of her.”

“Good.” That seemed more like the Scott she knew, responsible almost to a fault.

“Kris didn’t want me around, though. She picked the name without asking me and didn’t put me on the birth certificate. I still wasn’t sure I was actually Ella’s father.”

“Then what?” Molly squeezed Scott’s hand.

He squeezed back, his eyes not meeting hers. “I didn’t hear from her for a while, but then she started calling, asking me for money. She still wouldn’t let me see Ella. Did you know that unmarried fathers have no custodial rights? None. I was completely at Kris’s mercy, and I told her I wouldn’t give her anything unless we got a paternity test.” He paused, his eyes unfocused. Something dark flitted across his face, then disappeared.

“And?” Molly nudged.

Scott cleared his throat. “The test was positive—I’m Ella’s father. That was a relief, and I knew I needed to step up. I was living a couple hours away, but I’d drive to see Ella every weekend. Kris... she was struggling. Her father died a few months after Ella was born. Kris was drinking too much, and using something to cope—prescription drugs, maybe. I worried it wasn’t a safe environment for Ella, so I called social services. They sent someone over to check it out.”

“You did the right thing.” Once again, this sounded like the man Molly knew. The father she knew Scott to be. It was a relief to hear it.

He shook his head, guilt and regret spilling across his face. “The next day, Kris disappeared with Ella. It took me a couple weeks to track her down. She was living in a dirty apartment in another town, and it seemed, I don’t know, shifty. The thought of Ella living there—it terrified me. Kris still didn’t want me around, and I was nervous to call Child Protective Services in case she ran again, so I tried to keep tabs on Ella as much as I could.”

He paused, jaw tensing. Molly held her breath, waiting for him to continue.

When he spoke, his voice was low and gravelly, as if the words were being raked across a stone wall. “One night Kris was found dead. An accidental overdose. I was able to take Ella, since I had that positive paternity test. I had to adopt her, legally, since I wasn’t on the birth certificate. They gave her a new birth certificate after the adoption.”

Comprehension dawned as Molly realized what he was telling her—the tragedy, but also how he had responded. “You changed her name.”