Page 29 of Fatal Conspiracy

He tipped his head in agreement as he sipped his beer.“Hugo had very specific wants. Especially when he stayed in Duluth. I could get used to this view for the rest of my life.”

“The option is yours now,” she said with a shrug. “You don’t have to go back to the city.”

“True, but I do have to find work somewhere. I’ve decided not to worry about that until all of this is over. I can live in my cabin until December hits, so that’s my fallback plan for now if need be.”

“Were you raised in Minneapolis?” she asked, finishing her sandwich and setting her glass down on the table. The hotel restaurant had been accommodating, allowing her to order a kid’s meal for ease in handling. She also couldn’t eat a lot at one time due to her narrow chest. If her stomach became too full, it pressed up against her ribcage, making it uncomfortable and harder to breathe. For that reason, she’d learned to graze throughout the day and avoid large meals.

“Yes, in one of the suburbs, but the cabin is where I feel like I grew up. We spent a lot of time there with my grandparents in the summer,” he said. “Then I went to college at the University of Minnesota and started my internship at Black Marlin, where I worked for many years before accepting the job as Hugo’s assistant. I traveled extensively with Hugo, which was a definite perk of the job. We always attended the conference and then spent a few extra days sightseeing before returning.”

“It sounds like Hugo enjoyed spending time with you. Not many bosses would do that.”

He nodded, setting his beer down and peering out at the blackened lake. “Now that my exhaustive work blinders are gone, it’s easy to see that’s true. That was harder to see when I was exhausted while in the trenches. Some days, I felt more like a babysitter than an assistant. On those raredays that we hung out doing something other than work, that feeling disappeared. In hindsight, I can see that our relationship was multifaceted.” She took his hand and kept hold of it in the silence. “We’re always talking about me. What about you? Did you grow up in Minnesota?”

“Oh, no,” she said with a shake of her head. “Pennsylvania. I’m Amish.”

“Come again now?” he said, turning to her in surprise.

Her laughter broke the silence of the night. “Sorry, I should have said I was born into the Amish community. My parents were Old Order Amish from Lancaster. Ellis-Van Creveld Syndrome is typically found only in that population in the United States. When I was born, my parents were like…” She waved her hand at her throat and tossed her thumb over her shoulder.

“They left?” Her nod was short. “That’s…wow.”

“In their defense, their world was so much different than the one we live in, even when I was born thirty-two years ago. Suddenly, they were faced with a child who required extensive medical care, and they had no means to provide it. I could be bitter about it, but they gave me a fighting chance by doing the hardest thing they’ve ever done. Over half of babies born with my form of dwarfism don’t make it to eighteen months. I’m probably only here because they were selfless when faced with overwhelming choices.

“I have a letter they wrote and asked to be sent with me wherever I was taken. My mother’s pain was real as she scrawled her hopes and dreams for me on the paper. She was a mother and wanted what was best for me, but she knew she couldn’t give me that.

“I was sent to Boston Children’s Hospital and lived there for the first six months of my life. I required open heart surgery and pulmonary procedures.” She held up her left hand.“See this scar?” she asked, pointing to her palm below her pinkie finger, and he nodded. “That was from the removal of an extra finger. I had them on both hands and extra toes on both feet. To say I was a medically fragile and complex child was an understatement.”

“I had no idea,” he whispered, taking her hand again.

“Most don’t. They see the overall picture and think,Oh, she’s a little person. It’s more complex than that. Do you know what I mean?” she asked, and he nodded. “I was also born without baby teeth or nails.”

He lowered his brow and leaned in to inspect her hands, his eyes widening when he realized the truth. “Those are painted onto your skin. I never noticed.”

“Most don’t,” she said with a shrug. “My nail technician uses a special paint. I can’t do artificial nails because there isn’t anything to stick them to.”

“If you were born without baby teeth, what did you do until your adult ones came in?”

“I had temporary dentures as a child that worked okay, but weren’t ideal. After consulting with a dentist, it was determined that I had sparse adult teeth as well, so those were pulled and I got a full set of implant dentures in high school.”

“I’m sure all of that is just the tip of the iceberg of what you’ve been through,” he whispered. “Did you live in medical foster care?”

“That’s what one would expect, right? But no, I was extremely fortunate to have the best adoptive parents in the world. My mother was a nurse at Boston Children’s Hospital. It didn’t take her long to realize I had no visitors or family. I’d had no skin-to-skin contact with another human that wasn’t painful, so she stepped in. She was a NICU nurse, but after her shift, she stayed the way a momwould. She came in on her days off and was there for the surgeries, setbacks and little victories.

“Soon, her husband, who was a surgeon there, started coming with her on the weekends to see me, and they applied for an emergency foster care license. There was no way she was letting me leave the hospital with anyone but her. In the end, they adopted me while I was still in the hospital, so when I came home, it was to stay. We moved to Pennsylvania when she took a different job, and we lived there until I was ten. Then, we moved to California when she was recruited for a management position in one of the children’s hospitals. I attended college and worked in Silicon Valley for years. When they decided to move to Florida to retire, I also wanted a change, so I applied to Secure Watch. For the first time in my life, I moved thousands of miles away from the two people who had always taken care of me. It was a difficult adjustment at first, but now I love the independence. More than that, I love that they can enjoy their life without worrying about me.”

“They love you, so they still worry about you,” he said, and she nodded.

“True, but it’s a healthier kind of worry now. They’re both retired, so they do a lot of free care around the country in low-income clinics and such. I see them every few months, and I miss them between visits. They’re thinking about moving to the Midwest. It turns out Florida isn’t for them, but they also don’t want to move back to a big city. They find their time in the Midwest working in rural communities invigorating, so they’re exploring that now.”

“We need more people like them in this world,” he said, and she nodded vigorously.

“You’re not kidding. I’ll always be grateful for the sequenceof events that brought them into my life. I can never have kids, but if I could, I would want to be just like her.”

“You can’t have kids?”

She inhaled deeply for a moment before responding. It was always hard for her to admit, even though she had known from a young age that she could never be a mother.

“Imagine this body growing a child and giving birth to it,” she said, motioning at herself.