"Hailey." Voight greeted me pleasantly, waving me in. It took a few deep breaths for me to step into his office and close the door behind me."Come in. How are you holding up?"
"I'm hanging in there," I said as enthusiastically as I could, although I could feel myself waning with feelings of doubt at how this conversation was going just by the few minutes I was in here. "Ready to get back to work."
"Huh," Voight grunted, leaning forward in his chair. "If you have something to say, Hailey, say it."
"It's not what you think." Taking in a deep breath, I braced myself for what would come from this. "It has to do with Booth and something that happened a long time because of him."
"I'm listening."
"I don't have to tell you how much I blame Booth for making my old partner disappear." He nodded in agreement, pressing his fingers together on the desk. "There's no denying we were close. Garrett and I were planning on becoming something more than partners."
"Were you?" Voight raised his eyebrow in what seemed like interest but also some concern. I knew he would have a slew of questions. I could see the wheels turning, but I knew he would only ask the ones he needed to right now.
"We had talked about getting married and having kids, but after he disappeared, that all went away." Okay, so I kind of answered his question in an indirect way, but I couldn't seem to get the words out like they were forming in my head. " I found out I was pregnant with a little girl not too soon after, and I made the hard decision to give her up for adoption."
"Adoption." He repeated, the light beginning to spark in his eyes to what this conversation was leading to. I just hoped he took it the right way. It was one thing to keep secrets, but it was another thing if those secrets somehow came to light without knowledge of it. They always did, which is why I always held to the fact that honesty was always the best policy. "This little girl, where is she now?"
"As of a couple days ago, with me. I found out her parents died in a car accident last week."
"Last week? What took them so long to track you down?"
"When I was at the hospital, I was advised by my boss, Arthur Carson, to put a fake name on the certificate as the mother just in case he ever tracked me down."
"Your boss, he helped you put the baby up for adoption?" Eyebrows rising, he rocked back and forth in his chair as he came to terms with one of his detectives coming forward with something that could potentially impact his team in the near future.
"Yeah," I finally felt comfortable enough to take a seat in front of his desk, yet there was nothing comfortable about sitting there in front of him. "At the time, I was a wreck. I wasn't ready to be a mother and he knew that."
"You did what you had to do to keep her safe. I'm going to assume after you gave her up for adoption, you had no contact with the adoptive parents?"
"None at all." I had always tried to stay honest, and this time was no different. As many times as I had wanted to find my daughter, I knew I couldn't as long as Booth was alive. She was not some toy or puppet he could play with, and I wouldn't allow her to be played with. "To keep her anonymous, my boss and I made a deal that I would not make any contact with her or the adoptive parents. Her parents could tell her she was adopted, and when she was older, she could make the decision to find me if she wanted to."
"Huh. And your boss, I'm assuming kept tabs on your little girl, or how else would he have known she was being put into the system?"
"A lot of that day is blurry, but I do remember Carson specifically promising me he would keep her safe. I've never had a reason not to trust him. He wanted to track Booth down as much as Garrett and I did." Don't think that hadn't thought about that. I had lots of time to think about all the little factors and why taking Eva in without checking first wasn't ringing any alarms in my head.
Of course, I had always had that instinct that the social worker was telling the truth, or else I would have alerted Platt to the fact that this woman was lying and to have her escorted out of the building. The way Carson had always talked about it, he made it seem like Eva's adoption was always airtight. Yet, I still wondered why he would give her back to me when she could have been adopted by a loving family somewhere else.
"Okay. Regardless, I would still like to talk with your boss. I don't have to tell you what this looks like with the timing of Booth being arrested and that little girl coming into your life. Maybe it was her time to come to you. I want to make sure that's all it is." Nodding my permission, I stood after feeling like this conversation was coming to a close. "And Hailey?"
"Yeah?" I was just reaching out for the doorknob when I turned back around to face him. As thankful as I was that he wasn't angry, I knew this whole thing was far from being over with. I still had to figure out how to introduce the rest of the team to the team, and to my own family.
"I would like to meet your daughter when you're ready to share her with the rest of the world." He told me as I left the door open and nodded in silent agreement before leaving his office. I could feel everyone's gaze on me as I did. Everyone knew that if you went into Voight's office and closed the door, it was usually for personal reasons. It was hard to think about what those reasons were sometimes.