Page 117 of Happily Ever After

Flight

Flicka von Hannover

Alina’s real mother,

and other things you do on a plane.

Flicka clutched Dieter’s hand as they flew through the night, somewhere far over the Atlantic Ocean. She’d been fretting the whole way, turning dates and events over in her head, but nothing made sense to her.

The plane bobbled over a little turbulence in the dark, and Flicka grabbedhis hand more tightly.

Dieter stirred in his sleep from where he had the airplane seat reclined as much as it would go, but it wasn’t quite a full recliner. His ankles and feet hung off the end of the footrest.

“Dieter?” Flicka asked. “You awake?”

“I am now.” He shifted in the seat and opened his storm-cloud gray eyes to smile at her. “That damn brother of yours could have sent his plane withthe bedroom in it for us, but no, he sent the little plane withseats.”

“You think he might be making a statement?” Flicka asked.

“That he won’t be providing abedfor you and me on his plane? Yeah, I think that’s abundantly clear.”

“I need to ask you a question,” Flicka said.

Dieter moved her hand to his mouth and kissed her knuckles. “Anything, myDurchlauchtig.”

“I know this sounds weird,but I’ve been telling people that Alina was really my kid, that we got pregnant when I was twenty, and you adopted her because you and Gretchen couldn’t have kids and we didn’t want people to know that I’d had a child.”

“That’s a good story,” Dieter said. “You might have saved her life.”

Flicka bit her lip and then dove in. “It isn’t true, right?”

“I beg your pardon?” he asked, his eyebrowsraised.

“She’s your child, right?” Flicka asked. “I mean, yours and Gretchen’s, and what you said about getting drunk in a bar in Chicago? That’s the real story, right?”

Dieter closed his eyes for a minute like he was counting to ten, then opened them to stare at her. “Flicka, myDurchlauchtig,you’ve never had a child. Alina is the result of a drunken one-night-stand with Gretchen in Chicago,and I married Gretchen because I thought that providing a family for the child was in her best interests. I was in the delivery room when Gretchen gave birth to her, and they put the baby Lo-Jack on Alina until I took her home. Biologically, she’s my child, but not yours.”

She nodded. “Maxence confused me. He said I got fat that year, and it all sort offits.My father would have insisted onsomething exactly like that.”

“Yes, I mean,no,”Dieter said. “I saw you at Christmas in Chicago. You gained perhaps ten pounds in all the right places due to sticky toffee pudding, if I recall correctly what you blamed it on. I thought I would die of asphyxiation because I could not breathe when I looked at you.”

“Okay. You’re right, I suppose.” Her heart hung in her chest, pulling. “I justtold people that story so often over the last few weeks, and it kind of fit, that I was her real mother, you know?” Tears stung her eyes.

“You are magnificent with Alina,” Dieter said, closing his eyes and making himself more comfortable in the reclining seat. His hand strayed over her stomach, which she imagined was beginning to thicken as some sort of little embryo divided and multiplied inside.“I wish you’d been her mother. You’ll be a wonderful biological mother, too, but you’ve been mothering Alina so well. She needs a good mother, a real one, not just a biological shadow that disappeared. She loves you so much. It’s okay to love her.”

“The story was good, you know? It made sense.”

“It was.”

“And the timeline fit. And Alina’s eyes, her hair, the way she clung to me and I clungto her, everything fit. I just thought, maybe, I’d made myself forget what had happened, that it was the real story.”

Dieter opened his eyes. “Flicka, do you want to adopt Alina?”

“What?”

“Her biological mother relinquished all her parental rights. She doesn’t have a mother in the legal sense. You could adopt her. Then, you’d be her real mother legally, as well as in her heart.”

“I—I could,couldn’t I?”