It was probably for the best that Puddin’ couldn’t answer. For one thing, he was grossed out by people who kissed dogs on the mouth. For another, he was jealous enough of this poodle. He didn’t need yet another reason to hate him.
Thad measured out a half cup of the ground turkey, brown rice, and sweet potato mixture and dumped it in Puddin’s Burberry dog bowl. He still regretted Googling the price of it. He would never view his grandmother in the same way knowing she’d spent that kind of money on a dog bowl.
Puddin’ looked down at the food and then back up at him.
“What?” Thad asked. Then he remembered. “Sorry, I forgot to add your kibble, your royal highness.”
He grabbed the high-priced specialty dog food from the pantry and added some to the bowl. Then he topped off Puddin’s water before bringing a cup of coffee into the dining room where he’d set up his laptop. He needed to check his bank account before heading to the Bywater house.
Call him old-fashioned, but Thad still couldn’t bring himself to download banking apps onto his phone. He didn’t fully trust checking his account on the home computer either, but at least he’d added an extra layer of encryption to the house’s Wi-Fi.
He checked off the bills that had come through overnight using a pen and notepad he kept specifically for tracking his finances—another relic of times gone by. Just as he logged out of the bank’s website, an email notification popped up in the monitor’s right-hand corner.
He clicked on the icon. It was from the genealogy website Nadia had pestered him into sending a DNA sample to. It had started when a Tee Ball teammate of one of his nieces was diagnosed with a hereditary heart condition. Nadia becameobsessed with learning about their father’s medical history. Since they wouldn’t know where to find the asshole who had left their mother months after Thad was born, going the 23andMe route seemed like the best course of action.
But what had started out as something to protect her girls’ health had turned into an obsession for his sister. She was determined to learn everything there was to know about both sides of their family.
Thad had no idea how this stuff worked, but apparently there was information that could only be found on the Y-chromosome, and now that he was the last remaining male on the Sutherland side, mailing off his spit was the only way to dig deeper into the histories his sister so desperately wanted to learn.
A waste of time and money, in his opinion, but if anyone could bother him until he was willing to do anything to make it stop—including sharing his DNA—it was Nadia.
Thad knew there were people who shied away from using genealogy services because they didn’t want the government to be able to access it, but that wasn’t an issue for him. Uncle Sam had owned his DNA since he was eighteen.
He clicked the email and then the link that brought him to the website’s direct message page. Thad frowned in confusion, but it soon turned to irritation as he read through the message.
“What kind of bullshit is this?” He clicked on the sender’s icon. He had never seen this woman before in his life, yet she was claiming they shared the same grandfather? As if he was supposed to just believe that screenshot she’d attached was legit. Anyone with a smartphone could manipulate a photo.
“Of course, you’d love to meet your family in Louisiana,” Thad said with a grunt.
And how long after she met them would she try to shake his grandmother down for money? The woman had probably run across the profile from the local paper on Grams after she sold Sutherland Dry Cleaning, and figured an old widow with money in the bank would welcome her with open arms. Never mind the fact that her long-lost relative bit was essentially accusing that widow’s husband of having bastard children floating around out there. She probably hadn’t even considered that.
Thad reached over, intending to delete the message, but the longer he stared at it, the more it pissed him off. His grandfather was the most upstanding man he had ever met. Taking in his daughter and her two children after her husband bailed. Raising those two children as his own so his daughter could return to college and make a life for herself. Becoming a pillar of the community who had literally given the shirt off his back to those in need, or at least the shirts that had been abandoned by customers.
Andthat’sthe man this woman had decided to disparage?
Thad began typing a response. He wanted to see how far this scammer would go.
“Dude, what’s going on?”
“What the fuck!” Thad yelled, jumping up from the dining room chair and slamming the laptop closed. “What are you doing sneaking up on people, Von?”
“I texted you that I was coming in. I knocked, but you didn’t answer. So I used the key you gave me.”
“That’s for emergencies. So unless something’s on fire I’m kicking your ass.”
“This is an emergency,” Von said. “Actually, it isn’t.” He gestured to the computer. “I caught you looking at porn, didn’t I?”
“Shut up,” Thad said. “As if I give two shits whether you see me watching porn. I’m a grown man. I can watch porn if I want to.”
“You would watch porn in your grandparents’ house? What kind of sick monster are you?”
Thad was two seconds away from tossing his best friend out on his ass. He would do it with a smile.
“Wait, you weren’t on one of those message boards again, were you? We talked about this, Thad.”
“I wasn’t on a military message board. Did you come here for a reason?”
“Yeah.” Von pulled out a rolled sheaf of papers from his back pocket. “I got the estimate back from the contractor. It’s up there, man. No way can we afford to use this guy.”
