“We’ll come with,” Charlie and Kai say, following Drew out of the room.
“You look so good together,” Abby says, smiling softly before her brow creases. “I want to grill you about that, but I’m seriously freaking out right now.” She grabs my hand and pulls me down in between her and Demi. “You’ve got to give me something because I’m imagining all kinds of horrific things.”
“It’s not a bad thing,” I say, dabbing at my eyes with the hem of my shirt. I didn’t bother getting changed, and I’m still in my casual clothes. “At least I hope Drew doesn’t think so.”
The guys return in record time and distribute the drinks. I get up and sit on the other couch beside Drew, needing to be close to him when I tell him. Abby slinks into Kaiden’s lap in one of the large chairs, and Charlie sits beside his wife on the other couch, sliding his arm around her shoulders. Everyone can sense I have big news to deliver, and anticipation is rife in the air.
I gulp back a healthy mouthful of crisp white wine as I feel five pairs of eyes boring into me, wondering what the fuck is going on.
Time to put them out of their misery and rip the Band-Aid off. “I want to say first that I had no idea, absolutely no idea, about any of this until I learned the truth about Jane and her family and realized the Fords were the people I knew as the Hanks.”
“That was last Sunday,” Abby says.
“I didn’t raise my suspicions with you because I needed to be sure. I wasn’t about to drop a bomb if I wasn’t completely on the right track.”
“That’s what you spoke to Ares about as he was leaving,” Drew surmises.
I nod. “That and I asked him to push that funding through for Moonlight.”
“That was thoughtful,” Abby says.
I knock back more wine and eyeball Drew. “This is one of the things keeping me up at night.” And one of the reasons I wouldn’t let him fuck me in the kitchen a couple hours ago.
When we go there,ifwe go there, there will be zero secrets between us.
“What I didn’t say last week was my bitch of a stepmother was pregnant when our visitors came to stay.” I take Drew’s hands in mine, and I honestly feel like puking. “I didn’t realize Jane was pregnant too, not until she confided in me one night a few weeks after she arrived.”
“What?” Abby cries out.
Drew’s face pales as all the blood seeps from his skin. His hands are ice-cold against mine, and his limbs are rigidly still. He stares at me as if he’s looking through me, and I forge on, hoping he hears me through the shock. “Jane was heavily pregnant the last time I saw her and due any day. It’s why I was so worried she hadn’t said goodbye, but my father reassured me she’d gone somewhere safe to have her baby.” I chew on the inside of my cheeks as fresh anger blooms in my chest. “He lied. My stepmonster lied. It was all a ruse.”
“What are you getting at, Athena?” Charlie asks, casting troubled glances at Drew.
Drew is stiff as a rock, and my heart is breaking for him.
“I don’t know if Cadance was ever pregnant or if she was and her baby died in the womb or was stillborn because the records have been altered. Arlo’s birth certificate verifies Cadance and Amos Martin as his parents, but it’s not true.” Tears prick my eyes as I stare at a shell-shocked Drew. I let one fall free before I pull myself together. “The Luminaries helped me run DNA tests, and the results are irrefutable.” I squeeze Drew’s hands. “You are Arlo’s biological father, Drew, and Jane is his mother.”
ChapterThirty-Six
Drew
You could hear a pin drop in the room after Athena delivers that news, and then everyone talks at once, asking different questions, but I don’t hear them. And I can’t speak. Emotion is clogging my throat and sitting on my chest, compressing my lungs until they’re so tight I can’t breathe.
“Breathe, D.” My sister peers up at me from the floor with tears in her eyes. She rubs my hands and my arms, but I don’t feel it.
I’m numb, or I’m feeling too much.
I don’t know.
I can’t think straight.
“Come on, D.” Abby grabs my face in her hands. “Breathe with me. In and out. Nice and slow.”
My body cooperates even if my head is still floating in another realm, struggling to grasp the magnitude of Athena’s revelation.
Arlo isn’t her flesh and blood.
He’s mine.
