Despite warnings from an older night nurse not to trust the promises of busy executives, I waited nervously the following morning until Landon stepped through the glass doors carrying warm apple turnovers and fresh drawing supplies. Over the next month, he became a constant presence at the facility, sometimes arriving late in his business suits straight from the airport and other times visiting early on Saturdays with blueberry pastries to share at the garden table. He learned how to navigate my wheelchair over tricky thresholds and gracefully accepted my teasing about his terrible animal sketches while we painted together. One rainy afternoon, after studying a watercolor painting I made of a father and daughter by a yellow house, he asked me who the father was supposed to represent, and I pointed directly at his chest. The following weekend during a stroll through the back garden, he gently held my hands and revealed that he had been working with the state placement board to legally adopt me. He assured me that he would modify every bathroom in his estate in Franklin Tennessee to ensure my safety and comfort, promising to be the devoted father who would never leave my side.
While Landon prepared his countryside home with smooth hardwood ramps and a sky blue art studio, the home director called an urgent meeting regarding a shocking discovery in the archive storage files. An administrative clerk had uncovered my original birth certificate, which revealed my true legal name was Hallie Margaret Drake and listed my biological mother as Margaret Callahan. Margaret was the art instructor Landon had loved and planned to marry eight years earlier, but she had vanished without explanation just three weeks before their wedding. Frantic for answers, Landon tracked down the closest friend of Margaret named Naomi Wells in Louisville Kentucky, who tearfully revealed that the overbearing aunt of Landon named Gertrude Sterling had threatened to use her immense wealth to take her baby away if Margaret stayed. Landon soon received an old photograph of Margaret holding me as a newborn along with the address for the Pine Ridge Care Facility in rural Kentucky. Upon visiting the facility, he learned from the head archivist that Margaret had suffered severe complications during my birth and that Gertrude had secretly authorized her admission while blocking all of the letters from Margaret, leading my mother to pass away believing Landon had abandoned us both.
