“What do you mean?” His brother sounded genuinely confused by Niko’s question.
“I mean, is she keeping it? Are you going to be involved?”
“Yes, and I want to be.”
“What does that mean?” Niko asked.
“No one knows I’m the father.”
Niko turned to AJ, hoping that he heard him wrong. “You don’t want her to tell people you’re the baby daddy? That’s fucked up.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But no one knows?” he clarified.
“No. No one knows.”
“Did you just find out?”
“No.”
“When did you find out?”
“The night I took Poppy to the emergency room.”
Niko did a double take at him as all the air whooshed from his lungs. He felt like his brother had just socked him in his stomach. “You mean after Liam and Frankie’s wedding?”
“Yes.”
His chest felt tight, and it was making it difficult for him to breathe. This was his twin brother, who found out a girl was pregnant and didn’t even give a shit enough to tell him?
“So when we all went to look at her house the next day, you knew?”
“Yes.”
“Youknewyou were going to be a dad, and you didn’t tell me?” He had to hear himself say the exact set of circumstances to know that was what his brother had done.
“Poppy has pre-existing conditions. She’d been told her chances of getting pregnant were less than one percent, and it makes her pregnancy high risk. She didn’t want anyone to know in case the worst happened.”
Niko just tried to breathe. He took in the information he’d just been given. As butt hurt as he was, the only thing that actually mattered was that the baby and Poppy were going to be okay. It wasn’t about him or his feelings.
"But she’s okay?” Niko asked. “The baby is okay?”
“Yes. We heard the heartbeat at the twelve-week checkup.”
The heartbeat. His brother was going to have a baby. “Does anyone else know? Frankie? Yaya? Mom?”
He nodded. “She told everyone on Thanksgiving, but she didn’t say who the father was.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t ask her?”
“No.”
“Why not?” Niko repeated, trying to mask the frustration in his voice. Getting information from AJ was worse than pulling teeth, which had to do with his brain chemistry and nothing to do with him, but still it was hard to deal with, especially for someone with a short fuse.
