What did that mean for the future? I tried not to think about that and just silently prayed I was the father.
“We’ll have answers soon,” he added with certainty although his tone was anything but.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
ISLA
The words landedlike a bomb on my head, and my entire body froze.
“It needed to be done,” Julius added, looking at me with so much anguish in his eyes.
The door opened before I could respond. The doctor stepped back in, holding a white envelope. The cautious expression on his face told me that whatever we were about to hear was going to destroy us in ways we might never recover from.
My heart dropped into my stomach, aware this wasn’t going to end well.
Is it Julius or Kraven? Who do I want it to be?
The doctor tore through my thoughts. “Isla,” he informed in a tone that made my mouth dry.
“I have the preliminary results of your paternity test.”
Everything in the room catapulted as if we were in the waves of the ocean, just hanging on for dear life. I could feel both of them beside me now, closer than before. Almost like they weremagnets being pulled toward the same point, neither willing to give the other any space.
I was once again at the center of it all.
Finding my voice, I barely steadied it. “What does that mean?”
The doctor hesitated for a second. “It means there was a complication with the comparison.”
I shook my head, trying to follow along. “I don’t understand.”
“Well,” he accentuated the word. “The samples that were provided for your paternity test.” He looked at Kraven and then at Julius, and I wondered how much they had told him.
This was the mic drop moment for us all when he said, “There’s no familial match between the two men.”
The words didn’t register for any of us. “No… what?” I asked, my eyebrows pinching together. I was confused about where he was going with this.
“What I’m trying to say is…” He was obviously weighing his words.
Maybe trying to figure out how to make us understand what he was telling us.
The whole world stopped moving the second he explained, “The samples provided for the paternity test are not biologically related.”
Silence.
There was complete, total silence. It was devastating…
Fucking silence.
JULIUS
My stare instantly shifted to Kraven, really looking at him for the first time since all of this started. I could see it. Aware hecould feel it. I didn’t look like Melody or Joe, he did. It was the same realization I just had, the same dangerous understanding of what this implied and the consequences.
This should have made things clearer, simpler, and more efficient, yet it didn’t. It was much worse than anything I could have ever imagined. Except I never for one second contemplated this. Kraven didn’t move. I didn’t think he was even breathing.
I glanced at Isla next. She was staring straight ahead, trying to process what this meant for all of us, while I tried to rebuild my entire existence with this new information that was nothing short of earth-shattering.
