"Did you just call me baby?"
Silence fills the line.
"I did… Do you not want me to?" he asks shyly.
Usually, I'd tell a guy off if they called me that. But I think I like it when River says it to me.
"I don't know… It doesn't bother me that much. At least when you say it." A smile graces my lips, but then falters. "Look, Ipromise I'm okay. No one's making me say this. You know me. If they tried, I'd find a way to rebel."
"Yeah, maybe." He fleetingly pauses. "When am I going to see you again?"
I cast a glance at the bodyguard. "Hey, dude. Do you know when I'll be able to leave?"
"Sometime tonight," he replies vaguely. "Once the results come in."
"I'll see you later tonight," I assure River. "Are you okay, though?"
He hesitates. "Honestly, I'm not sure."
Worry knots in my gut. "What's wrong?"
"I… I'll talk to you when we're together again. I don't want to stress you out about this." He pauses as a man says something to him in the background. "I have to go. I'll remove you from the missing person's list for now, but if I don't see you later tonight, I'm putting you back on it."
With my lips smashed together, I nod. "Okay."
"I'll see you soon." With that, he hangs up.
A second later, Grey enters the room with a piece of paper in his hand.
"Maddy, can we sit down and talk?" he asks, gesturing toward the sofa.
I eye him over, attempting to determine if I resemble him. We have the same eyes and hair color, but that doesn't mean anything. Maybe he's wrong about this.
"Sure." I plop down on the sofa.
He sits across from me and props his foot up onto his knee. "I got the results." The way he's looking at me reveals what he's about to say.
Because he's looking at me in disbelief, as if I'm a goddamn unicorn.
Or his long-lost daughter.
"The results for me and you are a match," he tells me with a slight tremble in his voice. "You're my daughter, Maddison."
To say I'm stunned is the understatement of eternity. Sure, I suspected this might happen. But it also seemed so implausible.
It also leaves me with a ton of questions.
"I don't understand," I scratch at the back of my neck. "If that's true, then… Why in the hell did you and my aunt Ellie let me believe those abusive assholes that raised me were my parents?"
"I didn't know you existed,” he says. “If I had, I wouldn't have allowed that to happen."
"It still doesn't excuse it," I snap, my voice quivering. "Even if you didn't know… and my aunt Ellie did…" I shake my head furiously. "Why did Ellie lie to me?"
"To protect you," he explains. "I don't know why she kept you from me, but I do know that… Your aunt Ellie is an Everford."
I misstep as my brain struggles to wrap my head around what he’s saying. “But…But that still doesn't explain why it'd be better if my mother, or well, I mean Evalynn, raised me. She's an Everford, too."
He shakes his head. "No, Ellie and Evalynn are half-sisters. Evalynn isn’t aware of this. Their mother—your grandmother, had an affair, and Ellie was a product of it. Ellie accidentally discovered this when she was eighteen, close to the time we met. She was looking into it then, trying to figure out how the Everford bloodline still existed when everyone believed it was extinct, but I'm not sure if she ever found answers—her real father had already passed away by the time she found out all of this."
