Page 13 of The Lovers (Echoes from the Past #1)

“Mum, I’d like to know something about my real parents.

I love you and Dad, but I’d like to know where I really came from.

” Quinn knew it would hurt her mother, but she needed to know.

She’d tried all weekend to envision the woman who’d given birth to her, but all she saw was a pale oval where a face should have been.

Was she young or older, was she dark haired like Quinn, or had she been fair?

Did she have green eyes like her daughter, or did Quinn get those from her father?

Had they loved each other, or had she been the result of a mistake that neither person wished to repeat?

She’d just recently learned about where babies came from, and it was still a shock to think of two people doing that willingly—even more so knowing that the gross act adults indulged in could result in an unwanted child.

“Quinn, I’m afraid we don’t know anything about them at all, and neither does the adoption agency. You were found in Leicester Cathedral. Someone left you in the front pew wrapped in a blanket.”

“Who found me?” Quinn exclaimed, shocked to learn this new version of the truth. Left. Abandoned. Not even given up for adoption, but discarded like an empty coffee cup or a newspaper.

“The Reverend Alan Seaton. He heard a baby crying but thought nothing of it until he came out of the vestry and spotted you there. He called the police, of course, but they had nothing to go on.”

“Nothing?” Quinn whispered.

“There was a note tucked into the blanket. I have it if you’d like to see it. I saved it for you. I knew you’d want answers one day, but I’m sorry to say that’s all we have.”

“Yes, I’d like to see it,” Quinn replied. She imagined she’d be able to see something in the note everyone else failed to notice, but it was just a scrap of paper, torn out of some notebook. Quinn stared at the writing on the note. It was in pencil and said very little:

Quinn

Born September 27, 1983

“Is that it?” Quinn asked, disappointed.

“Yes, that’s it. Social Services had no idea whether Quinn was your last name or first name, but they passed the note on to us, and we decided it must have been your given name, so we kept it.”

Quinn. Someone had bothered to name her and provided her date of birth. At least she knew that much, but it was very little to go on. It was a dead end, and she had to learn to live with this new reality.

Over the years, Quinn tried to put a different spin on the story of her birth, but the uncertainty of what really happened tore at her soul, refusing to let her find peace.

She tried to pretend that her mother was a young girl, who was frightened and alone and couldn’t afford to keep her, so she left her in a church where she knew the baby would be found by someone trustworthy and passed on to the authorities.

But the fantasy wasn’t enough. She longed to know the truth, no matter how painful it might be, especially once she discovered her ability to see into the past .

Quinn supposed that she had it all along, she just never realized it, not having known anyone who died before.

She’d been almost eleven when Grandma Allenby died.

Ruth Allenby had been Quinn’s favorite grandparent, the one she spent the most time with given that she lived only a few streets over.

Her mother’s parents were good, loving people, but they lacked the imagination and sense of fun Grandma Ruth seemed to possess.

At nearly ninety, she had been sprightly and young at heart, not like any other old person Quinn knew.

Quinn loved having sleepovers at Grandma Ruth’s.

They spent hours listening to wartime jazz, looking at old photo albums, and telling ghost stories by the light of the old spirit lamp.

Quinn’s favorite ghost story was about Grandpa Joe, who died long before she was born.

Grandma Ruth said that Grandpa’s spirit lived in the house and would look after her until she went to join him in heaven.

She looked forward to seeing him again after all this time.

“Do you think he’ll look old when you see him, Grandma?” Quinn asked, wondering if Grandpa Joe would appear as he did in his fifties when he died or if he would look like Grandma Ruth, wrinkled and frail.

“I bet he’ll look just as handsome as he did when I first met him in 1942.

He had been a surgeon, and I was one of the nurses at the Alexandra Hospital in Singapore,” her grandmother said, her eyes clouded with memories.

She didn’t like to talk about the war, or the atrocities she had witnessed, but she liked reminiscing about her Joe.

She always said good night to his picture, which stood by her bed, the sepia photograph framed by a heavy silver frame.

Grandpa Joe was in uniform, his lean face serious as he stared into the camera, but Quinn could still see the laugh lines around his mouth and the twinkle in his eye that Ruth so often alluded to.

She said it was that twinkle that led to the existence of her father, Roger.

Quinn hadn’t been at all sure how a twinkle could produce a little boy, but she took her grandmother’s word for it.

Her grandfather must have retained the twinkle since there had been four other children after Roger.

And now Grandma Ruth was gone; her little house was the same but utterly different without her in it. Quinn hoped that her grandparents were finally together, as Grandma Ruth always said they would be.

“Quinn, darling,” her mother said, interrupting Quinn’s reverie as she stared at the photograph of her grandfather after the funeral. “Grandma Ruth wanted you to have this.”

Her mother held Quinn’s hand and lowered a gold chain with a heart-shaped locket into her palm.

Grandma Ruth always wore that locket. Joe had given it to her on her twenty-second birthday in 1943.

It contained a tiny picture of the two of them, dressed in civilian clothes.

They looked so young and earnest then. Quinn squeezed her fingers shut around the locket. She would treasure it always.

Quinn suddenly had an image of her grandmother, as she appeared in the locket, running down an unfamiliar-looking street, the heels of her shoes clicking on the pavement.

She seemed anxious and kept turning to look behind her, as if someone were chasing her.

Ruth breathed a sigh of relief when she spotted Joe, who jumped from a military jeep and enfolded her briefly in his arms before helping her into the car and speeding away.

Quinn heard the whistle of a bomb and then the deafening roar of an explosion as a silver-bellied plane emptied its cargo onto the burning city.

Quinn was so frightened, she dropped the locket, and the image of her grandparents vanished like smoke, leaving her confused and disoriented.

Quinn sat down on the bed, her brow furrowed with concentration.

She couldn’t remember Grandma Ruth telling her that story.

She never spoke of bombs or terrifying raids that turned buildings to rubble and painted the sky black with smoke from countless fires burning all over the city.

Instead, she told Quinn about dancing with Joe at a jazz club and even showed her some of the dance moves of the time, making Quinn giggle as they did the twist in the kitchen.

Ruth reminisced about strolling beneath the palm trees on a moonlit night and how Joe proposed to her over a patient lying open on the operating table because he simply couldn’t concentrate on performing the surgery until he had her answer.

But perhaps Quinn had forgotten and chose to remember only the stories she enjoyed.

Over the next year, Quinn saw countless images of Grandma Ruth, not only during the war but of Ruth as a child, as wife and mother, and later, as a widow.

Quinn no longer believed that she was remembering the stories her grandmother told her.

No, the stories came from the locket, and she saw them only when she held the locket in her hands and the gold grew warm from the heat of her skin.

Quinn didn’t know how to navigate what she saw, and at times she was frightened by the depth of her grandmother’s sorrow or fear, but there were also visions of love and joy, and Quinn cherished those, knowing that her grandmother would have wanted to share those moments with her.

Quinn wore the locket all the time; she wore it still, as a tribute to her beloved Grandma Ruth, the person who unwittingly unlocked her gift.

Now that she was a grown woman, Quinn understood how her ability to see into the past worked and could even manage to choose what she saw by mentally focusing on a specific year, but it was a secret she kept to herself.

She’d tried telling her parents after experiencing those first unexplained visions, but they didn’t believe her.

Her father rationalized it as a manifestation of grief and a desire to retain a link to Grandma Ruth, and her mother said that the images were simply a figment of her imagination, an explanation that Quinn readily accepted, despite knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that what she was experiencing was quite real .

As Quinn got older, she realized that the strange ability she’d been born with had to have come from somewhere or someone.

She must have inherited it from one of her parents, but of course, she had no one to ask.

Quinn made up stories in her head, imagining that this link to the spirit world was passed from generation to generation down her mother’s line, the ability bestowed only on the first daughter of the first daughter and so on.

It was a romantic tale that helped her make peace with the strange and often frightening images she saw.

Quinn learned not to pick up old objects and made sure that she wore gloves when there was no choice.

Her gift came in handy in her profession, but she didn’t welcome it into her personal life, wary of where other people’s recollections might lead her.