“What’s going on here, Clive? Who is this…lady?” he asked.
The woman who looked like Jenny smiled. “I’m Sam’s wife,” she said. “I’m Jenny.”
Mia, who still had her arms around the woman’s waist, cried triumphantly. “You see daddy, it IS mommy!”
“Mommy?” the woman said, touching Mia’s face gently. “I wish I were! I always wanted a little girl…I was going to call her…Mia.”
“I’m Mia!” the child said. “And you’re my mommy, and THAT is my daddy!”
Clive was pale as death and trying to squirm out of Sam’s iron grasp. “It’s not what you think!” he cried. “I didn’t plan it, it just happened…”
“What happened?” Sam asked.“After the accident…You know the car was so burned… We had the funeral…” Clive said. “Then one night I was watching a late-night missing persons show and they showed the photo of a woman who’d been found. It was Jenny! She’d had some kind of brain injury…She didn’t remember who she was, but doctors thought from the injuries and the burns she’d been in a bad crash. Then I remembered how Jenny was always picking up those young girls who hitchhiked… I guess that’s who died in the car, and Jenny was thrown clear.”
“Why didn’t you come to me?” cried Sam angrily, “Mia and I were mourning her, we were in such pain!”
Clive couldn’t look Sam in the eyes. “I loved Jenny. You knew it when you started dating her. You TOOK her from me, so I took her back…”
