"Just shine like you always do."
Gwenn Davidson has always known she was adopted, but after clearing up her stuff for her first move out of her parent's house, she finds an old blanket gifted to her by her birth mother that triggers an avalanche of...
A SOFT HUM BUZZED in the air of the library. The two stories were mostly vacant, save for a few students, who looked ready to pass out over their textbooks and pens. Since no one paid attention to anything, Ronan led her to the computers on the second floor, holding her hand.
They rushed onto a cubicle, Ronan squeezing a chair next to his for her. Gwenn was too tired and too flushed to fight him for it. He started the computer, logging in using his credentials. He had previously explained how he preferred to use the library for deeper research since they had access to more databases than he could get his hands on. Gwenn wondered how many times she must've walked right past him and never noticed him, ankle deep into a database to find a person for someone offering big sums of money.
The guy knew how to hustle.
"I should be able to bypass easily," Ronan muttered, more so for himself as he typed. The screen turned black before a bunch of code ran down in colorful type before it switched back to normal. Gwenn blinked, then stared at him dumbfounded.
"Ronan, please don't tell me you're doing something you're not supposed to," she said. His jaw clenched as the adoption center's webpage loaded up. "Please, answer me."
He caught her eye. "When have we ever done anything that we weren't supposed to?"
That shut her right up. He didn't even wait for her to retort with a weak comeback and went back to going over files he had successfully accessed. She didn't know how he did it, but she found the old, cliché saying to be true: ignorance is bliss.
"What exactly are you looking for?" Gwenn asked, hoping to ease off the tension from her shoulders with a needed distraction. Her breath wavered when she thought of asking Ronan for another massage, maybe then she'd be loose and relaxed as she went about her life in the town of Lockfell.
He didn't answer except hum under his breath. She learned after tutoring him how he'd zero in on his task, often forgetting his surroundings. She'd know he was still aware of her when he bumped his knee with her thighs, or drum his fingers on her arm, or even reach back and rest his arm around her shoulders. Otherwise, his eyes were trained on what he worked on, his thick eyebrows furrowed as he tried to understand everything he had on hand.
The screen took a second to load, but then a weird white thread showed her about a thousand names that meant nothing to her. Except that every last name was Woods. She leaned closer, ignoring Ronan's hitching breath as she pressed her side onto his.
"What is this?"
He swallowed before pointing with a shaky finger. "I'm trying to find every woman with the name Woods that put a baby for adoption twenty years ago." He scrolled through the thread, showing an endless list of names. Her eyes glazed over when they didn't even make it to thirty percent down.
"Is there a way to narrow this down?" Gwenn asked.
Ronan bit down on his lip. "I already narrowed it down to just Arizona."
A breath of disbelief fell from her parted lips. "How did so many women put so many babies up for adoption with that last name...in the same year?" She didn't even bother to keep her voice down, despite them being in the library, but at that point, she did not care. The idea seemed impossible. That amount of women in one state with the same last name couldn't have possibly put out babies for adoption. Something must have been wrong with the thread.
"Maybe this is a list of all the babies adopted in Arizona or went through the system in Arizona that came from a woman with the name Woods," Ronan tried to explain. He scrolled through more of the thread, but that only deepened the groove in his forehead. "This is damn near impossible, Davidson."
Her gaze fell over the wooden cubicle, fluttering over the black keyboard where his hands hovered. Her heart ran up her throat and she couldn't find any way to swallow it back down so she could spit out actual words.
"I'm still gonna try every angle, honey," he whispered, as if he could feel the pain of disappointment coursing through her veins, freezing up her limbs. "We just have to find the right angle to go about this situation." He ran his hands through his hair, tightening his fist around the dark roots.
"Is there a way to find a tie between me and the last name Woods?" Gwenn said, throwing out the words as if she fought greatly to throw them out into the air. "Like a cross-search of some sort?"
Ronan frowned. "That might be hard to do considering it was a closed adoption."
She slouched her shoulders. "But A Chosen Bond must have something that points back to my biological mother. Anything."
He tilted his head back as his spine connected with the chair. A shadow crossed the ice of his eyes. "We already found the non-identifying information on her."
"And we can't use that and the last name Woods to draw a search on her file?" she continued, turning so her body faced his rigid one. "She had to have had a file done to agree to the adoption. She must have had a whole process done to give me away. That information has to be at A Chosen Bond."
A beat of silence followed. Ronan studied her from between his dark lashes and then turned to the computer's screen that still shone the never ending list of women that gave their children up for adoption the same year she was born.
"Information like that won't be easily accessible through their website," he revealed. "It's gonna be tougher to get your hands on it, and if we go back in there, we'll have to start the process on adopting a child, my dearest wife. I'm sure the background check is gonna come back with flying colors. It'll be fun to be parents behind bars."
She sat back, allowing his words to fall over her like an unwanted downpour. Her brain went on overdrive, the kind of exertion she got when she was so close yet so far to getting the answers she wanted. She mentally pushed against the wall of cinderblock in front of her, not caring for the strain on the fragile skin of her hands.
"Then we get in without anyone noticing," Gwenn concluded. She could almost see the wall cracking under her palms, debris trickling down around her.
Ronan got rid of his tabs, the clicks of his mouse echoing in the small beat of silence. She waited for him to respond, to say anything. His inked fingers kept either tapping over the desk or absentmindedly circling the mouse across its green pad. He closed his eyes. "How are we going to manage that, honey?"
She smirked when he met her gaze.
"We break in, of course."
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