Author's Note: I am so sorry for the delay in posting. Right after I posted chapter 7, my own personal life took a very soap opera-ish turn, and let's just say that life doesn't always turn out the way we thought it would. I hope to continue this story, but my posting will likely be sporadic. I hope you'll stick with me until the end.

Chapter 8

Erica's head shot up at his words, and she turned on him in fury.

"That is NOT how it was! How dare you! You have NO IDEA what it was like for me, how I felt or how I suffered, all ALONE!"

"Then TELL ME Erica, because damn it, I'm having a hard time understanding how you could give away our child and never breathe a word of it to me!" He yelled at her.

He stood up then and paced across the room, the tension evident in his body. On the second pass across the hotel room, he turned to look at her.

"I'm waiting," He said.

She looked at him helplessly. How in the world could she make him understand why she'd kept this secret? Her chest tightened in a panic.

"I couldn't…" She started to say in a quiet voice.

"I… Jack there was no way to tell you. I was having a baby with your brother. I never thought you and I would end up together," She said. "I was trying to protect the baby I was having with Travis, protect my relationship with him."

Jack shook his head in disgust. "And even after his death, I'm still in competition with Travis. So you're telling me that your baby with him was more important."

"That's not what I'm saying," She said. She stood up then and went to him. She wanted to reach out to him, put a hand on his arm, touch him, draw him close to her, but she was afraid to do so. She'd never seen him this angry before.

"Jack, what we had, when you came to Pine Valley, it was just… it was one night. We had both moved on with our lives, and I wanted to put the past behind me. If I'd told you the truth then, what good could have come from it?"

"What GOOD?" He exploded. "My God, are really that self-centered, that selfish?"

"Excuse me?" She was taken aback at his words.

"You think no GOOD could have come from me knowing that I had a child out there somewhere? And she was still a child then, wasn't she? She would have been…" He paused, doing the math in his head. "She would have been in elementary school then, right? You didn't think I had a right to know?"

Erica folded her arms over her chest, trying to hold herself together.

"What would you have done? What Jack? It was a closed adoption. I had no idea who the agency chose as adoptive parents. You weren't listed on the birth certificate because I didn't even know your real name. Would you have sued the agency? Tried to track down that little girl? Tried to undo the adoption? Disrupt and wreck her life?" She asked.

She was well aware that contested adoptions had been overturned before, sometimes even after the child had been in the adoptive home for months or even years. News reports of those overturned adoptions, complete with heart-wrenching videos of sobbing children being torn from the only home they'd ever known, tore at her heart. She had no desire to see Jessica suffer that same fate if Jack knew the truth and tried to contest the adoption.

"If I'd told you the truth then, with the state of your relationship with Travis, it could have destroyed the relationship he and I had, and Bianca would have been denied her father," She added, hoping to play on his sympathy and his love for Bianca.

Jack pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration, a gesture she recognized as his attempt to calm down enough for rational conversation.

"If I'd known the truth and destroyed your relationship with Travis, you might not have ended up losing custody years later, Erica. Do you get that? That whole mess with Barbara and Travis and the custody trial might never have happened."

"Perhaps, or he could have taken Bianca from me as a baby, and I'd have that to cope with on top of you fighting the adoption and ruining Jessica's life!" She retorted.

Jack's head shot up then and he stared at her in shock.

"What did you say?" He asked hoarsely.

Erica stared back at him, unsure which part he wanted her to repeat.

His blue eyes filled with tears as he looked at the woman he'd wanted for so long to marry.

"You… you said 'Jessica,'" He said in a hoarse whisper.